Body/Power/Identity: Passions of the Martyrs - Evergreen

Body/Power/Identity: Passions of the Martyrs

Shaw, Brent D.

Journal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 4, Number 3, Fall 1996,pp. 269-312 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/earl.1996.0037

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Body/Power/Identity:Passions of the Martyrs

BRENT D. SHAW

Martha Graham, that connoisseur of bodies, and therefore someone whoought to know, is reported to have remarked that “the body never lies.”1

But in that case, what truth does it speak? Let us begin with two stories.Both involve a woman and bodily resistance. One is pagan and “ficti-tious.” The other Christian and “true.”

TWO SCENES

The first is a scenario from the popular milieu of the novel—more pre-cisely from the second-century Greek romance entitled Leukippê.2 Theheroine of the novel, Leukippê, had once been a free woman, but at thispoint in the story has been reduced, by a series of conventional misfor-tunes (shipwreck, seizure by pirates), to the status of a slave. Her new

Journal of Early Christian Studies 4:3, 269–312 © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press.

The author would like to thank those who attended seminars and talks at Duke Uni-versity, The Pennsylvania State University, the European History Colloquium at Cor-nell University, and the History Colloquium at the University of Calgary, for their pa-tience with earlier versions of this essay, and also for their helpful suggestions. Hewould also like to offer his gratitude for criticisms made by Hendrika Beaulieu, PeterBrown, Carlin Barton, Maude Gleason, Natalie Kampen, and David Satran.

1. Martha Graham, Blood Memory (New York-London: Doubleday, 1991), wherethe formulation “Movement never lies” is also found. She begins her memories with atelling observation that in such movement: “One becomes in some area an athlete ofGod.”

2. Achilles Tatius, Leukippê, 6.18–22; one of the more popular of the Greek novels(to judge from the quantity of surviving papyri in Egypt), it was probably written aboutthe third quarter of the second century c.e. As with most ancient novelists, almostnothing certain is known of the author—he might have been a Greek writing fromAlexandria. The text here is that of J.-P. Garnaud, Achille Tatius d’Alexandrie: Le Ro-man de Leucippé et Clitophon (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1991).

owner, a vulgar brute bearing the appropriate name of Thersandros, fallsin love with her. In order to have his imaginary dream of romantic lovefulfilled, he requires her to respond to him as if she were a free person,one whose freely willed and volitional feelings for him will complimentthe sentiments he has for her. He advances to her beginning with words,but then proceeds to physical touching: “As he talked with her, he placedhis hand on her shoulder . . . he began to embrace her, moving forwardto kiss her.” Leukippê reacts physically by assuming a posture of bodilyrejection: “seeing the course his hand was going to take, moving over herbody, she bent her head forcefully downwards, resting it against herchest.” She manipulates the longing gaze. By forcibly looking downwardsand away from him, and by refusing to look into his eyes, she implicitlyrejects the connecting moment when lovers’ eyes meet and the most pow-erful emotional responses are set in motion. Thersandros, meeting resis-tance, responds with more forceful physical moves: “he encircles her neckeven more with his arm, trying to compel her to lift up her face.” But inresponse “she continues to hold her head bent down and tries to avoid hiskisses . . . and some time is consumed in wrestling against the force of hishand.” Thersandros then becomes more violent, escalating his use ofphysical force: “he puts his left hand beneath her face, while with the righthe takes hold of her hair—jerking her head backward with the one, andpushing up under her chin with the other, he forces her to lift her head.”But at the point where he is about to kiss her, the futility of what he is do-ing dawns on him. Which is to say that Leukippê’s microphysical resis-tances have succeeded in transforming the scene from one of seduction toone of rape. With his volitional scenario effectively destroyed, Thersand-ros is forced to retreat in exasperation and to begin again afresh with adifferent script that will work. As this first series of physical confronta-tions is closed, Leukippê can resort, once again, to words. She can labelthe situation so as to make clear that the free action and the identificationof autonomous self necessary to romantic love is absent from this rela-tionship. “You are acting neither as a free man nor as a noble one” (outehôs eleutheros poieis, oute hôs eugenês).

Thersandros’ response is to redefine the relationship as one where hewill no longer approach her within the frame of romantic love, but ratherone of forced sex. She is his slave; he is her master. She will simply haveto do what he requires. “Damned slave” he shouts at her and strikes herdirectly on the face. He shouts out that she should consider it a consider-able piece of good fortune merely to be able to kiss him. Since she will notaccept his wish scenario of free desire, she is therefore to have anotherforced on her: “Since you will not receive me as a lover, you will experi-ence me as master.” Leukippê herself then redefines Thersandros’ new re-

270 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

lationship to her as that of the illegitimate domination of a totalitarianruler: “If you choose to be a tyrant, then I must be tyrannized by you—but you will never win by force.” A bystander who is watching the en-counter, one Sostratos (the pirate and slave-dealer who sold Leukippê toThersandros) advises the liberal use of the whip to teach the woman whois lord and master. In reply to the threat of the direct use of violence onher body to compel her, Leukippê retorts:

Set out your instruments of torture. Bring out the wheel. Here are my arms—rack them out. Bring on you whips—here is my back, lash away. Bring outyour swords—here is my neck, hack away. Bring on the fire. Here is mybody—burn it. Feast your eyes on a new and marvelous sight—one woman,all alone, contends with all your many tortures and overcomes them all. . . .

The challenge is one that was being made by other women in the worldof her own time.3 Leukippê then compares Thersandros to a pirate and abandit, the base anarchic powers of her world. He is worse than them—the illegitimacy of his power is marked by his inability to control his sex-ual impulses. If he cannot gratify his lust, he murders its object.

Take up all your instruments of torture, and at once; bring out against me the whips, the wheel, the fire, the sword. . . . I am naked, and alone, and awoman. But one shield and defense I have, which is my freedom, which can-not be struck down by whips, or cut by the sword, or burned by fire. Myfreedom is something I will not surrender—burn as you might, you will findthat there is no fire hot enough to consume it.

The body itself is seen to embody identity/self/freedom and can itself beused to resist the final acts of violence imposed on it. The “I am” state-ments that conclude the brutal scene: “I am—naked, I am—alone, I am—a woman” (egô de kai gymnê, kai monê, kai gynê) are the quintessence ofthe identity problem that is at its heart, and, the power relationships thatare inherent in it. The presentation of Leukippê, the fictional person in theworld of the novelist, is that of a woman who recognizes that althoughher body is owned, she is not. Though a slave, it is her will or consent thatis to be the final arbiter of the self.4

SHAW/PASSIONS OF THE MARTYRS 271

3. It is no mere coincidence that Simon Goldhill, “How Like a Woman,” ch. 3 (in)Foucault’s Virginity: Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of Sexuality (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1995), 112–61, notes, at p. 117, that “Her speech to him[viz. Thersandros] is a masterpiece of empassioned self-defence that would fit well intoa Christian martyr text.”

4. Primo Levi: “We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, con-demned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it withall our strength, for it is the last—the power to refuse our consent.” From Survival inAuschwitz, transl. Stuart Woolf of Se questo è un uomo, Turin, 1958 (New York:Macmillan, 1960/1993), 41.

The second story is the first in the surviving corpus of letters of the latefourth-century Christian ideologue Jerome.5 It is cast in that rhetoricalmixture of eroticism and outright pornography of which Jerome, a saint,was particularly capable.6 About the year 370, in the Ligurian munici-pality of Vercellae at the foot of the Italian Alps, the Roman governor whowas making the round of his judicial assizes was presented with a womanwho had been accused of adultery. The accusation was false. Her husband(for his own reasons) had informed on her supposed involvement with ayoung man. To elicit the truth from him, the young man’s body was sub-jected to a series of cruel tortures. As the “bloody hooks raked and lac-erated his sides” he relented, confessed, and so, as Jerome describes it,“lied against his own body.” The young woman was condemned by hislie and thus had no means of resistance left except that of her own body.She had to show herself to be stronger than the man whose body had justgiven up under the physical attacks upon it—she would be called upon tobe “braver than her own sex.”

As horrendous tortures were vented on her body, she had only her bodyleft as a mode of resistance. It is seen as being in competition, pittedagainst the failed strength of the male body of her supposed lover, theadulterer, and tested against the bodily strength of the executioner him-self. As a final, desperate stratagem, she could have some hope of revers-ing the normal map of power by exploiting her own body. In her world,those who ruled, adult male citizens who held formal power, were ex-pected to exemplify an economical control of the self, a mastery over theslavery of the passions, a rule of the cool of the mind over the heat of thebody—a special problem given prevalent views of the physiology of themale body. But the “feasting of the eyes” on the sight of her bodily resis-tance had the opposite effect on the governor. The woman’s exertion ofcontrol over her own body, and its sustaining power, drove him to thefrenzy of a wild animal. He fell into a fit of uncontrolled anger, becameirrational and out of control in a public forum and thereby brought into


5. Jerome, Ep. 1 (CSEL 54.1–9). The letter displays some rather unusual rhetoricalthemes for Jerome; for an exploration of some of the possible contemporary contexts,see A. Chastagnol, “Le supplice inventé par Avidius Cassius: Remarques sur l’HistoireAuguste et la Lettre I de saint Jérôme,” (in) Bonner Historia-Augusta-Colloquium1970 5 Antiquitas Reihe 4 (Bonn: Habelt, 1972): 95–107.

6. Patricia Cox Miller, “The Blazing Body: Ascetic Desire in Jerome’s Letter to Eu-stochium,” JECS 1 (1993): 21–45 [see ch. 8, “Jerome and His Dreams,” (in) Dreamsin Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 205–31], is a good evo-cation of how Jerome’s rhetoric is a “paradox wherein erotic sensibilities are both de-nied and intensified.”

doubt his fitness to rule others.7 The potential for this distortion, andhence its manipulation, even by near-dead and dying bodies, was com-monly recognized: one could therefore exploit the spectacle of one’s ownsuffering to overcome the self-control of the spectators.8

The “adulteress” finally reached a point where she felt, like the fiction-al heroine Leukippê, that she could openly challenge her torturers to dowhatever they could to her: “strike me, burn me, cut me in pieces. I didnot do it.” She defeats her torturer with her body. “By this time the tor-turer was gasping and groaning. There was no place left to wound. Hisvery savagery defeated, the torturer was horrified at the body which hehad so mangled.”9 She wins the first round. The governor gives up in ex-asperation. But since the man, her putative lover, had confessed, that wasenough for him—the woman must also be guilty of adultery. He sentencedthem both to death. Once again, the young man’s body proved routinelyamenable to punishment—at the first stroke of the sword the head wassevered from the rest of his body. The woman’s body, however, provedmiraculously resistant to steel.

The various attempts at executing her are cast in a pornography of pow-er, of violent encounters between the male executioner’s body and that ofthe woman. In a typical scenario of execution, forced to her knees she of-fers a quintessential female part, her throat, to the executioner’s sword.10


7. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation inEarly Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 12, “the time wornpolarity between ‘male’ self-control and its opposite, a convulsive violence, associatedwith a ‘womanish’ lack of self restraint,” with some striking examples.

8. Plato, Rep. 439e–440a; and Augustine, Conf. 6.8 (13) are the classic instances.9. Jerome, Ep. 1.6: “Caede, ure, lacera. Non feci.” Again, it is hard not to see this

bodily encounter between a woman and her male torturers as not being cast by Jeromein a covert erotic language; see Cox Miller, “The Blazing Body,” 37–8, in the contextof Ep. 125. The torturer, working away on her body, “gasps and groans,” where theverb (suspiro) is also used in erotic contexts, as commonly in the lyric poetry of thelate Republic: J. N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (London: Duckworth, 1982),195, citing Juv. Sat. 6.37, Tib. 1.8.37, Petr. Sat. 87.8, Lucret. 4.1192 (suspirat) andAnth.Lat. 253.18 (suspiria), to which one might add, e.g., graffiti from Pompeii: CIL,iv, 4342: “suspirium puellarum tr(aex) Celadus.”

10. On the throat, “the other mouth,” as the vulnerable part of the woman, seeN. Loraux, “Regions of the Body,” ch. 3 (in) Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, transl.A. Forster (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 49–65 [Façons trag-iques de tuer une femme, Paris, 1985]. G. Sissa, Greek Virginity, transl. A. Goldham-mer (Cambridge., Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 48 f. [Le corps virginal,Paris: Vrin, 1987, 70 f.]; A. E. Hanson, “The Medical Writers’ Woman,” ch. 9 (in) D.M. Halperin, J. J. Winkler and F. I. Zeitlin, eds., Before Sexuality: The Constructionof Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1990), 309–38, at pp. 325–27.

His several attacks on her body with his “sword” are likened to repeatedsexual “drives” (impetus) into her body.11 At the first his sword merely“touches her body” and “draws a little blood.” The man prepares him-self for a second attack but his “sword” becomes “limp” (languidus) andfalls “harmless” on her neck.12 Now he is panting and gasping and inpreparing his third thrust he throws aside his cloak so that he will be ableto use “all his power.” He places his sword right to her throat so that,with the pressure of his hand, he could force it into her body. But thesword instead of proving to be sufficiently hard “bent back on its hilt.”13

He fails.In describing all of these assaults, Jerome uses a language and an im-

agery that hints, and not too subtly, at the most obscene and insultingphysical and sexual assault that could be made on anyone’s body.14 Inthe second attempt to execute her, a newly appointed executioner takesthree more thrusts to achieve his mission, strikes that apparently killher. The executioner departs, but the supposedly dead woman miracu-lously clings to life. Her “corpse” is exchanged for that of an old womanwho has just died. Taken off into hiding, she has her hair cut short andis dressed in a man’s clothing. The virile woman. Her body has, in theend, triumphed over the attacks of the strongest of men. The whole taleis replete with discourses of power that flow through her body, andwhich are clearly understood to have political significance. They ques-tion not only the authority of the delating husband, but also that of thegovernor, and, finally, of the whole authority structure of the empire.Jerome closes his account by quoting a few words (no doubt of oral ori-gin) from Terence’s play The Self-Torturer that had become a popularexclamation: “How true is it that complete legality is complete injus-tice.”15


11. Gladius (and other sharp weapons) frequently for the penis: Adams, Latin Sex-ual Vocabulary, 20–21, 219; for ictus and impetus for the male “drive” or “attack” onthe body of the woman in intercourse, ibid., 148–9 and 159.

12. Languidus/langueo for the flaccid penis: see Adams, Latin Sexual Vocabulary,46 f.

13. Capulus can mean either the hilt of a sword or the membrum virile: Plaut. Cas.5.2.29; Auct. Priap. 24.7; cf. A. Richlin, The Garden of Priapus, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Ox-ford University Press, 1991), 122.

14. That is to say, Jerome’s words and images all have strong sexual connotations;on irrumatio, see Richlin, Garden of Priapus, 149–50; and her, “The Meaning of Ir-rumare in Catullus and Martial,” CPh 76 (1981): 40–46; Adams, Latin Sexual Vo-cabulary, 125–30

15. Terence, Heauton Timoroumenos, 796: ‘O vere, ius summum, summa malitia.’

A MODEL

These stories have embedded in them paradigms of how to confront pow-er in situations where silent scripts, both individual and collective, becomepublic.16 Such a point is reached when individuals or communities aredriven beyond the point of any endurance, where their fundamental ele-ments of identity are publicly questioned precisely in order to be effaced,and there are, so to speak, no options left except to die in silence or, indeath itself to express some type of opposition to the imposition of over-whelming force. A classic instance, and certainly one critical to the laterdevelopment of Judaism, and therefore Christianity, was the Jewish resis-tance to Syrian domination in the decades after 168/67 b.c.e. The over-powering tyrannical force used by Syrian rulers and their agents to com-pel an unconditional cultural surrender was central to later literaryremembrances of the confrontation. The conflict was evoked in individ-ual theatrical pieces in which the subjects were left with the nil choice ofeither denying the very essence of their identity or accepting death. Thelater scripting of this encounter in written narratives became rather elab-orate fictions, all the more so since the image of collective ethnic resistancehad simultaneously to confront the ugly facts about important and pow-erful members of the indigenous community who did not see strict tradi-tion as particularly worthwhile—about those who, in a word, collabo-rated.17 But the Maccabean accounts of opposition to foreign dominationand of the direct challenge to one sort of identity nevertheless provide uswith a classic instance of a public “no”—the open rejection of a ritualis-tic litmus test of types of sacrifice and publicly performed ceremonials thatconstituted an essential surrender of community and the self. The the-


16. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts(New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 1990); cf. F. Crespi, Social Action andPower (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 95 f. For a parallel analysis of theconscious manipulation of public values in the service of a “hidden transcript”: B. D.Shaw, “African Christianity: Disputes, Definitions, and ‘Donatists,’” (in) M. R. Green-shields and T. A. Robinson, eds., Orthodoxy and Heresy in Religious Movements: Dis-cipline and Dissent (Lewiston-Queenston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 4–34.

17. D. Mendels, The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism: Jewish and Christian Eth-nicity in Ancient Palestine (New York-London: Doubleday-Anchor, 1992), chs. 1–3;the later scripting of this confrontation varies from the one in I Maccabees that em-phasizes the polarity of external threat and internal social unity, together with the hero-ic actions of a single individual (Mattathias at Modin), to the complex and murky pic-ture in II Maccabees in which the external threat is ancillary to an internal culture-war,where the deeds of the Maccabean family are peripheral to diversely striking and ex-emplary episodes of heroic resistance (Eleazar, the Mother and her Seven Sons, Razi).

atrical confrontations between brutal foreign overlords and recalcitrantsubjects so vividly inscribed in the books of the Maccabees provided char-ter-like archetypes of how to use one’s body when there was no furtherpossibility of resistance. The body was at the epicenter of this form of pub-lic display since, in order to make one’s point, one had to accept the highprobability of its obliteration.

The moral and philosophical treatises, histories, and various other lit-erary forms generated by the Maccabean resistance reached a rather com-plex mix by the first century b.c.e. But the peculiar form, and document,with which I am concerned here, however, probably dates to the late firstcentury c.e., and is therefore of particular relevance to the ideologies ofthe emergent Jewish sect of the Christians.18 Fourth Maccabees is an ex-traordinary contemplation of the significances of body, soul and mind,sexuality, death, punishment and resistance. In formulating his protocolsof refusal the writer of Fourth Maccabees was able to draw on the elab-orate formal ideologies of resistance that had been developed by the élitesof the Graeco-Roman world in their encounters with tyrannical forms ofrule. The repertoire included typecast stories of individual resistance un-der extreme physical punishment, such as the story of the female prosti-tute who, being tortured by a tyrant, bit off her own tongue and spat itin her torturer’s face as a symbolic “final word.”19 But the overriding ide-ology that the writer systematically appropriates was less that of exem-


18. As with most of the so-called pseudepigraphic texts, this one is difficult to date.Elias Bickermann, “The Date of Fourth Maccabees,” Louis Ginsberg Jubilee Volume(New York, 1945), 105–12 5 Studies in Jewish and Christian History, vol. 1 (Leiden:Brill, 1976), 275–81, placed it specifically in the period when he believed Cilicia wasjoined to Syria as a common Roman province (between c.e. 19–54). A precise date forthe treatise is probably not possible to determine based on the internal evidence alone(which is all that we have). So long as it is located in the period of the first centuriesc.e., that is sufficient for my purposes, since I am not arguing for any direct causal linksbetween the ideology in Fourth Maccabees and those expressed in other texts, butrather that they are being generated out of common problematical concerns. Most cur-rent opinion argues (rather more convincing in my view) that Bickermann’s argumentscannot hold and that, based on stylistic, and other, considerations, the treatise is like-ly to date to around 100 c.e.: J. W. van Henten, “Datierung und Herkunft des ViertenMakkabäerbuchs,” (in) J. W. van Henten, H. J. de Jonge, P. T. van Rooden, and J. W.Wesselius, Tradition and Re-Interpretation in Jewish and Early Christian Literature:Essays in Honour of Jürgen C. H. Lebram (Leiden: Brill, 1986), 137–49.

19. Tert. Apol. 50.7–8, at the end of a long list of non-Christian philosophical mar-tyrs, but which begins with the statement that Christians, in controlling their own self-identification, control their own destiny. The exemplary tale was renowned. Pliny (NH7.23.87) retells it under the heading of “patientia corporis,” calling the case of Leaenathe prostitute (meretrix) the most renowned of all cases amongst women (clarissimumin feminis).

plary popular stories than the more subtle naturalistic legitimation of Sto-icism.20

In his borrowings, the author of Fourth Maccabees sought to link sev-eral elements in the body/identity/power matrix, but to do this in such away as to draw on existing orthodox ideologies on those subjects for hisown purposes. The most obvious of these is the relationship between de-liberate rational reasoning (philosophôtatos logos) and the body, its feel-ings, drives, sentiments—in short the passions (hoi pathoi).21 The mainpoint is that one can be Master of Oneself (autodespotos) by using mindand logical powers to control the body. In short, a sort of Stoic philoso-phy writ small for everyone—a conception restated again and againthroughout the treatise as its basic theme.22 In a treatise directed to thecontrol of the body under punishment and torture, it is perhaps interest-ing to note that this self-moderation is exemplified by the story of Josephthe wise man (ho sôphôn) who through mental effort (dianoia) was ableto control his drives to sensual pleasure (hêdupateiai), an achievementwhich is seen as all the more remarkable because he was a young manwho was at the height of his drive to sexual intercourse (neos gar ôn kaiakmazôn pros synousiasmon).23 The message is reiterated repeatedly inthe rhetoric of Fourth Maccabees: knowledge and logic enable one to con-trol the body’s driving forces so that one does not become subject to thebody—a slave to one’s passions, and so to others.24 The mind can over-come not only hedonistic pleasures, but also sensations of pain and suf-fering experienced by the body.25


20. B. D. Shaw, “The Divine Economy: Stoicism as Ideology,” Latomus 64 (1985):16–54.

21. M. Nussbaum, “The Stoics on the Extirpation of the Passions,” ch. 10 (in) TheTherapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1994), 359–401 [Apeiron 20 (1987): 129–77], explains the “hardline” Stoic position, which came to be modified by the later Stoics who aimed at “con-trol” rather than “extermination”; see also D. C. Aune, “Mastery of the Passions: Phi-lo, 4 Maccabees and Earliest Christianity,” (in) W. E. Helleman, ed., Hellenization Re-visited: Shaping a Christian Response within the Greco-Roman World (Lanham, Md.:University Press of America, 1994), 125–58.

22. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure, transl.R. Hurley (New York: Random House, 1990), esp. introduction, ch. 3, and pt. I andII; and The History of Sexuality, vol. 3: The Care of the Self, transl. R. Hurley (NewYork: Random House, 1986), pt. 2.

23. IV Macc 2.1–6.24. IV Macc 3.1–3.25. IV Macc 3.17; and, to an extent perhaps unusual in some Stoic sources, the au-

thor of IV Macc (1.20–27) dichtomizes the pathoi into the duality of pleasure and pain:see Aune, “Mastery of the Passions,” 134 f.

The second appeal is to existing ideological norms of positive social val-uation, especially to ideals of the body derived from contexts of its con-scious control and visual deployment—above all, that of the quintessen-tial public display of personal worth through the body: the athletic contestor agôn. By recounting in lurid detail the horrible tortures inflicted on thebodies of Eleazar, and the seven young men, and finally, their mother, theauthor of Fourth Maccabees places their confrontation with politicaltyranny within the framework of an athletic contest. He always presumesan audience of onlookers, and assumes that the spectators will be hostile.The point is to deploy one’s body so as to change the assumed rules of thegame—they are there, voyeuristically, both to enjoy the spectacle of pun-ishment and to see it as underwriting their values: they order; you obey.They are there to witness the final display of violent power over subjectbodies. They are also present to witness the production of a truth—thetortured subject will confess (homologein—a good Stoic conception) thenecessary words and will agree to perform the required public ritualisticacts of assent. But the subjects of torture can resist with their bodies sothat all three propositions will be defeated.

The tortured can view the confrontation, however unequal, as a con-test (agôn) between their body and those of the torturers and spectators.The active agents of domination can be forced to be amazed, to wonder(thaumazein) at the ability of the tortured body to defeat all the punish-ments inflicted upon it. Having that sort of control over one’s own bodyenables the tortured to be silent, to speak through their bodies, and thusnot to speak the required words. It is, rather, the spectators who will beforced to confess: to admit their defeat and to confess the superior pow-er of the tortured body. A precise parallel is drawn with the thoroughlyprepared and trained athlete: if one holds out long enough, one wins. Thevictim of torture then acquires the greatest value attributed to persons ofhigh social status in this world: they are ennobled, imbued with an auraof aristocratic demeanor—the type of inherent excellence reserved by na-ture for the ruling élite, but one which could be acquired by a victoriousathlete through the exercise of his body.

More significant than all of this is a novel value that is enshrined inFourth Maccabees as not just any value worth acquiring, but the pre-eminent excellence that is hypostatized above all others—the one that isvaunted as the operative guide of how to behave under extreme duress.This was the sheer ability of the body to resist, to endure the applicationof any force to it: “endurance” or hypomonê (Äupomonh). Sheer endurancewas now lauded both as a behavioral practice and as a high moral ideal.So the spectators are not only amazed and wonder at the courage and


manliness (andreia) of the Maccabean martyrs—that was quite tradition-al—but also at their simple ability to endure (their hypomonê). What isstated here is so ordinary that it might escape notice—so understated thatit might be dismissed. It is a subtle part of a movement or shift that con-stitutes a moral revolution of sorts. Praises of active and aggressive val-ues entailed in manliness (andreia) by almost all other writers in the worldof the Maccabees could easily fill books. The elevation to prominence ofthe passive value of merely being able to endure would have struck mostpersons, certainly all those spectators, as contradictory and, indeed,rather immoral. A value like that cut right across the great divide thatmarked élite free-status male values and that informed everything aboutbodily behaviour from individual sexuality to collective warfare: voice,activity, aggression, closure, penetration, and the ability to inflict pain andsuffering were lauded as emblematic of freedom, courage, and good. Si-lence, passivity, submissiveness, openness, suffering—the shame of al-lowing oneself to be wounded, to be penetrated, and of simply enduringall of that—were castigated as weak, womanish, slavish, and thereforemorally bad.26 The equation of these two virtues—nobility (gennaia) andpassive endurance (hypomonê)—would have struck the classic male ide-ologue of the city state as contradictory, a moral oxymoron. But this wasprecisely the concatenation of values which the author of Fourth Mac-cabees wrote about quite explicitly, and which he vaunted and advocatedas the ethic of primary importance to the body in the final, critical publicscenes in which it would be required to participate.

All the values and behaviors that are embodied in Fourth Maccabeesare summarized in its peroration:27

Truly divine was the contest in which they were engaged. On that day virtuewas the umpire and the test to which they were put was a test of endurance.The prize for victory was incorruption in life without end. The first contes-tant was Eleazar, but the mother of the seven children also competed, as didthe brothers themselves. The tyrant was the antagonist, and the world and allliving men were the spectators. Piety won the victory and gave the crown of


26. So widely analyzed and commented on by now that it hardly needs reference.In addition to Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, see J. Winkler, The Con-straints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece (New York-London: RKP, 1990), chs. 1–2; D. M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexual-ity, and other Essays on Greek Love (New York-London: RKP, 1990), chs. 3 and 5;and P. Veyne, “Homosexuality in Ancient Rome,” ch. 3 (in) P. Ariès and A. Béjin, eds.,Western Sexuality: Practice and Precept in Past and Present Times, transl. A. Forster(Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 14–35, for some classic, though perhaps overly schematic,formulations.

27. IV Macc 17.11–16.

victory to its own athletes. Who did not wonder at the athletes of divine law?Who were not amazed?

Therefore, the conscious production of a rather elaborate conception ofpassive resistance. Or perhaps, to put it more honestly, the explicit co-optation of passivity in resistance as a fully legitimized male quality—achoice that could be made by thinking, reasoning and logical men. Thatchoice could be exercised in specific dramas of political legitimation inwhich, since the stakes were so high, the body itself was at the epicenterof its viability. It is therefore no accident that the extraordinarily strongideologies that came to be attached to the body and its replacement cameto fruition simultaneously with this practice. The conceptions of life afterdeath and of the resurrection of the body are also precisely concurrentwith the Maccabean rebellion.

The reworking of traditional thematic materials and the re-presentationof traditional stories at this same time in order to incorporate the new sig-nificance of endurance is evident in a number of other texts contemporarywith Fourth Maccabees, amongst which the Testament of Joseph is prob-ably the prime example.28 The developmental cycle of conceptions, fromself-control and sexuality to torture and punishment, and the centralityof hypomonê, is similar to that in Fourth Maccabees, but the message ismade much more explicit. In his peroration to his assembled children,Joseph repeatedly refers to accusation, arrest, imprisonment, and punish-ment; and of being humiliated, threatened, made an object of fun,whipped, and kept under guard in prison. In all of these testings, he states,he endured “because perseverance (makrothumia) is a powerful medicine(mega pharmakon) and endurance (hypomonê) provides many goodthings.”29 The rest of the monologue is an unremitting catalogue of anEgyptian woman’s unsuccessful attempts to compel Joseph to have sexu-al intercourse with her.30 The first litany of such attempts (an alternatingseries of threats and enticements) is concluded by Joseph’s observation:“You see now, my children, what great things can be accomplished by en-


28. Text: M. de Jonge, ed., Testamenta XII Patriarcharum (in) A. M. Denis &M. de Jonge, eds., Pseudepigrapha Veteris Testamenti Graece (Leiden: Brill, 1964),67–79.

29. T. Jos. 2.7: Ãen dÝka peirasmoœiv dükimün me ÃánÝdeixe, kai ÃÝn pœasin aÃutoœivÃÝmakrojýmhsa· ™oti mÝga fÜrmakün ÃÝstin Äç makrojumßa, kai polla Ãágaja dßdwsinÄç Äupomonç.

30. Goldhill, Foucault’s Virginity, 118 f., draws attention to the centrality of thetheme in the novels, especially Heliodoros’ Aethiopika which has a plot very close toT. Jos. (though Goldhill prefers the parallels in the apocryphal acts of the Apostles,mainly those of Thekla and Paul).

durance (hypomonê) and prayer. You, too, can do this if you pursue self-control and purity along with endurance (hypomonê) and humbleness ofheart.”31 The second half of the text is devoted to yet another successionof attempts at sexual sieges on Joseph’s body, this time matched by evenmore savage beatings and tortures. Once again, the message is closed byan appeal to endurance—this time linked to the transcendent value of loveor agapê: “You see now, my children, how many things I endured not tobring my brothers into disgrace. You should therefore love one anotherin patient endurance.”32

Perhaps the most remarkable text that dates to some time in this samepenumbral age, however, is the Testament of Job. It is so thoroughly in-terstitial or liminal in ideas and composition that generations of scholarshave been unable to agree whether the tract is “Jewish” or “Christian,”and they are equally undecided about a precise date and provenance. Thework seems to be rather more Jewish than Christian in many of its basicthemes, but in just as many of its novel aspects it seems closer to nascentChristian ideologies. Many dates have been proposed, but the most prob-able seems to be in the early second century.33 Its importance for our in-quiry is manifest. It is a treatise, which, although calqued on the canoni-cal OT book of Job, is a rather novel composition that deals explicitlywith the problem of endurance and suffering. Without laboring over theinteresting details of this work, there are two features in it that are man-ifest and of interest to me. First, it is positioned in a group of works (alongwith Fourth Maccabees) that are explicitly devoted to the subject of en-durance (hypomonê) as an autonomous conception. Then there are therhetorical stratagems in which the problem is presented. These terms, Ishall argue, reflect a manifest “feminization” of the text as compared toits canonical OT predecessor.


31. T. Jos. 10.1: ™Orate oÃuœn, tÝkna mou, püsa katergÜzetai Äç Äupomonç, kaiproseuqç meta nhsteßav. Kai Äumeœiv oœun, Ãean tçn swfronsýnhn kai tçn ÄagneßanmetÝljhte Ãen ÄupomonÞ kai tapeinþsei kardßav.

32. T. Jos. 17.1–2: ™Orœate, tÝkna, püsa ÄupÝmeina, ™ina mh kataisqýnw touvÃadelfoýv mou; Kai Äumeœiv oœun Ãagapœate Ãallçloõv· kai Ãen makrojumßaiv sugkrýpteteÃallçlwn ta Ãellatþmata.

33. The text used is that edited by S. P. Brock, Testamentum Iobi (in) A. M. Denisand M. de Jonge, eds., Pseudepigrapha Veteris Testamenti Graece (Leiden: Brill, 1967),19–59. It seems almost certain that Tertullian used this text (or a variant from its tra-dition) in his De Patientia: 14.2–7, reflecting TJob 3.7–9; 14.2 5 TJob 1.5; 14.4 5 TJob24.4, 25.20c. Therefore, TJob should probably be dated at or before the mid-second century. Word studies seem to suggest a date contemporary with the produc-tion of the later books of the New Testament—therefore in the decades right at the endof the first century or beginning of the second, see D. Rahnenführer, “Das Testamentdes Hiob und das Neue Testament,” ZNTW 62 (1971): 68–93.

At the beginning of the dialogue that is presented as his last will andtestament, Job summons his children and reveals his identity to them: heis a man created wholly by endurance (en pasê hypomonê genomenos).34

The context is one of proselytism, of Job’s conversion to true belief andhis destruction (with a gang of assistants) of a nearby temple of a falsegod. What is striking is not just that Job suffers for his conversion, butthat his destruction of the temple involves him in combat with Satan andthat his reward for victory is to receive the crown of victory and resur-rection and eternal life. To which Job replies: “I will endure to death andwill not retreat” (achri thanatou hypomeinô).35 Hypomonê or enduranceis Job’s cardinal virtue.36 His direct confrontation with Satan is met withprecisely the same challenge that Christian martyrs were to make to theirtorturers: “Do whatever you will do. For if you wish to direct somethingagainst me, I am ready to withstand whatever you bring against me.”37

Job then explicitly compares his ability to display endurance under painto a woman in childbirth: “I was not able to say a word. I was prone andexhausted—like a woman numbed in her pelvic region by the great num-ber of birth pains.”38 The metaphor is set in a context where it is Job’sbody, not his mind, that is handed over to Satan to torture.39

But it is Job’s wife who actually bears a major part of the narrative overthe first half of his story. In contrast to the OT Book of Job, she is actu-ally named as one Sitis. It is she who suffers the shame and degradationthat result from the destruction of her husband’s household. She is likenedto a prostitute. Her head is shaven off in ritualistic punishment, and she


34. TJob 1: Ãegw gar eÃimi Äo pathr Äumœwn Iwb Ãen pÜsŸ ÄupïìïnŒh genümenov.35. TJob 5: ÕAqri janÜtou Äupomeßnw kai oÃõ mh Ãanapodßsw; cf. II Macc. 14.44.36. C. Haas, “Job’s Perseverance in the Testament of Job,” ch. 6 (in) M. A. Knibb

and P. W. van der Horst, eds., Studies in the Testament of Job (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1989), 117–54, at pp. 117–18, noting that makrojumßa (and parallelterms) and karterßa (and parallels) are used as synonymous with Äupomonh. What oneis witnessing, in fact, is a usurpation of the former conception by the now increasingdominant one of patience.

37. TJob 7.13: ÂO poieœiv poßhson. eÕi ti gar boýlei ÃagÜgai moi, ™etoimüv eÃimi Äup-ostœhnai Âaper ÃepifÝreiv moi. . . .

38. TJob 18.4: Kai oÃuk ÃhdunÜmhn fjÝgxasjai. ÄhtonhmÝnov gar Õhmhn Äwv gunhpareimÝnh tav Ãosfuav Ãapo toœu plhjouv tœwn Ãwdßnwn. Parallels with Qumran texts andthe Psalms have been noted (see Haas, “Job’s Perseverence,” 123): “And I was con-fined like the woman about to bring forth at the time of her first child-bearing” (1QH3.6 f.). This is significant since Job’s wife is later compelled to admit (24.1–3) that herbirth pains were all in vain.

39. TJob 20.2–3: kai Ãapeljwn ŸÄthsato to sœùmÜ mou para toœu Kurßou ÔinaÃepenÝgkh moi plhghn. kai tüte parÝdwkÝn me Äo KuŒriov eÃiv qeœirav aÃutoœu qrhsasjaitœwÓ sþmati Äwv Ãhboýleto, tœhv de yuqœhv mou oÃuk Õedwken aÃutœwÓ thn Ãexousßan.

is subjected to repeated public humiliation. Sitis, however, is not able toendure these attacks on her person, and accordingly has to be lectured byher husband Job: “If we have received good things from the hand of God,should we not in turn endure all evil things? Rather, let us be patient tillthe Lord, in pity, shows us mercy.” Matching the new significance attrib-uted to Job’s wife, is the central role played by Job’s three daughters in theculminating episode of the text. Job’s daughters protest the distributionof all their father’s worldly goods to his sons. But Job reproves his daugh-ters’ dismay when he bestows upon them a gift that he manifestly holdsto be a much better and more important inheritance than the one he hasgiven to his sons—the daughters receive special multicolored belts that aresuffused with marvelous magical powers.40

Job persists in his grinding contest with Satan and finally produces astate of sheer exhaustion in his persecutor. Satan compares himself to anathlete, who even though he has the superior (literally, the upper) physi-cal position, has been defeated by the one who is pinned underneath.41

Hence the final words of Job to his children: “Now then, my children, youtoo must show patience in everything that happens to you, for enduranceis better than anything.”42 In the rhetorical formation of this text, withits obvious emphasis on passive suffering on one level, there is a not-too-covert feminization of the text that is coordinated with it on another lev-el.43 Not only does Job’s wife become a recognizable character who is cen-tral to the first part of the narrative, but his daughters are the maincharacters in which the whole story finds its end. The degree of the shifthas been qualitatively, and quantitatively, observed. Quite apart from theanonymity and marginal reference to Job’s wife and daughters in the OTbook, van der Horst notes that “not even 1 per cent of the verses of thebook of Job speak of women, his wife and daughters . . . in contrast nofewer than 107 out of 388 verses in T. Job deal with women, i.e., almost


40. TJob 46–50, with a description of the marvellous effects on the girls when theyput them on.

41. TJob 27.3–5.42. TJob 17.7: nœun oœun, tÝkna mou, makrojumhsate kai Äumeœiv Ãen pÜnti sumbaßnonti

Äumœin, Ôoti kreßttwn Ãestin pantov Äh makrojumßa.43. From this broader perspective, I am not concerned with debates over whether

this image of women is meliorist or simply another variation of misogyny: see, e.g.,S. R. Garrett, “The ‘Weaker Sex’ in the Testament of Job,” JBL 112 (1993): 55–70, asopposed to P. W. van der Horst, “Images of Women in the Testament of Job,” ch. 5(in) M. A. Knibb and P. W. van der Horst, eds., Studies on the Testament of Job (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 93–116. I am interested in the deploymentof different gender types in the text itself and how this reflects, or reveals, changingemphases on fundamental values and how those values are tactically presented.

thirty times as much space as in the biblical book.”44 The degree of shift,paralleling the increased emphasis on the mother of the seven sons inFourth Maccabees as compared to Second Maccabees, must be deliberateand must reflect the desire of the author to develop the problem of pa-tience by deploying a more “feminized” rhetoric.

A HISTORY OF ENDURANCE:LA NOUVELLE ÉCONOMIE DU SALUT

The texts of Fourth Maccabees, the Testament of Job and the Testamentof Joseph are just indicators in a larger shift in values that comes intosharper focus in the penumbral age of the first century c.e.45 The prob-lematic issues of the time seek definition through the public rituals of tri-al and torture, come to be expressed in an explicit terminology of theirown, and are consciously reflected upon in written texts.46 The novel sen-timents of these changes, however, cannot be read in isolation. They be-token a new role that could be thought about, and attributed to, the body.A noticeable tendency in the current application of Foucauldian preceptsto the problem is to produce rather manichaean models of male and fe-male bodies, and of “maleness” and “femaleness.” But not even in themost refined of male ideologies in antiquity, that of the high Greek city-state or polis, whether in its philosophical discourses or in its technicalmedical treatises, was the male body (and therefore the problem of man-liness or andreia) seen as a seamless whole constructed solely of male el-ements. Rather, from his very conception, and in his growth, the man andhis manliness were constructed of both “male” and “female” constitu-tive materials, so that even the act of procreation of a new male bodywas, so to speak, a “crapshoot” as to which elements in the seed of ei-ther partner (the male or female elements in a man’s sperm) would pre-dominate.47


44. Van der Horst, “Images of Women,” 94–95.45. The phrase “la nouvelle économie du salut” is borrowed from Spicq “‘Upomonh,

Patientia,” 101 (no. 56 below): “Il rest à voir la place et le sens de l’Äupomonh dans lanouvelle économie du salut,” referring to its new function in the New Testament andPauline ideology of personal salvation.

46. I shall not be dealing with all instances; for overviews, see the standard ency-clopaedic treatments by M. Spanneut, “Geduld,” RAC 9 (1976): 243–94; andF. Hauck, “‘Upomonh, s.v. (mÝnw),” TDNT 4 (1942), 585–93 [Engl. transl. TDNT 4(1967/1975), 574–88], who cites the earlier bibliography.

47. Hippok. De Gen. 6, 7.479 (Littré), see I. M. Lonie, The Hippocratic Treatises“On Generation,” “On the Nature of the Child,” “Diseases IV” (New York-Berlin:de Gruyter, 1981), 3; for comment, see M. Gleason, “The Semiotics of Gender: Phys-iognomy and Self-Fashioning in the Second Century c.e.,” ch. 12 (in) D. M. Halperin,

So too a man’s being consisted of various parts (tripartite in the classicPlatonic formulation) where “lesser” bodily elements, including those ofmind and soul, contained “weaker” feminine parts with which the manhad to contend. But in this overall economy of the body the “lesser”virtues also had their necessary part to play—in the general definition, anddefense, of the self these “less manly” virtues, such as the long-term pow-er of simple endurance, were deemed just as important in any man’s moralarmament. That is to say, for the man, something as self-evidently con-tradictory to the quintessence of what he was to be—namely, the passiveability simply to stand in one’s place and to “take it”—was thought to beas necessary for his survival as the “higher” male virtues of assertive andpurposive action. The need for such unmanly virtues was admitted, buttheir denigration was simultaneously affirmed. In his extensive discussionof shame, Aristotle concluded that, “people feel shame when they sufferor have suffered things that contribute to dishonor . . . of which beingphysically violated is one . . . for submission and lack of resistance comesfrom effeminacy or cowardice.”48 No doubt, that is why the later Hel-lenistic collection of “Platonic definitions” had to report what was by thenthe common defense for such weak and inferior behavior when it had tobe exhibited: if necessary, it could be justified in the name of the beauti-ful and the good.49

This hidden economy of the body resonates not so much in the publiclyconcerned writings of the city-state, especially those of its philosophicalideologues, as in texts marginal to its concerns, from epic and lyric poet-ry to the technical jargon of the doctors.50 The polarization of ideals ofthe body engendered by the emergence of the politicized city-state con-structed males as persons who had bodies that stood erect, inflicted pain,and died on the field of battle; female ones as suffering bodies, lying prone,giving birth in bed.51 Conceptions of civic bodies were therefore attached


J. J. Winkler & F. I. Zeitlin, eds., Before Sexuality, 389–415, at pp. 390–91; and A. E.Hanson, “Conception, Gestation, and the Origin of Female Nature in the Corpus Hip-pocraticum,” Helios 19 (1992): 31–71.

48. Arist. Rhet. 2.6.13: Ãapo Ãanandrßav gar ¼h deilßav Äh Äupomonh kai to mh Ãamýnes-jai. Transl. George A. Kennedy, Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 145.

49. Ps.-Plat. Horoi 412c: karterßa: Äupomonh lýphv Ôeneka toœu kaloœu· Äupomonhpünwn Ôenika toœu kaloœu; cf. 412b: ÃegkrÜteia: dýnamiv Äupomenwtikh lýphv.

50. N. Loraux, “L’opérateur féminin,” (in) Les expériences de Tirésias: Le fémininet l’homme grec (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 7–26 5 The Experiences of Tiresias: TheFeminine and the Greek Man, transl. P. Wissing (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1995), 3 f.

51. Loraux, “Le lit, la guerre,” ch. 1 (in) Les expériences de Tirésias, 29–53 [fromL’Homme 21 (1981): 37–67] 5 The Experiences of Tiresias, 23–43.

to specific barometers of pain and resistance.52 The formal texts that pa-raded these dichotomies, however, barely disguised the trench warfare ofcontinually disputed public meanings and aggravated inner doubts thataccompanied them. Such an underground bodily economy, existing in theshadow of what was aggressively asserted and publicly vaunted, was arather disturbing thing—especially since its values conflicted so muchwith the superior valuation placed on the male virtues of penetration, ag-gression, action, and domination. It was recognized that the conditionsnecessary for the demonstration of these were not always fulfilled eitheron the critical proving ground of andreic ideas and bodies, the battlefield,nor even within the body of the man himself. The internal struggle tomaintain a corporeal entity that was under constant insidious micro-sieges required for its defense precisely those “lesser” feminine powerswithin the body. It took frank discussion, and a critical analysis that didnot flinch from such undesirable and disturbing presences, to bring theminto the open and force their recognition. But that led to a well-nigh un-resolvable debate on just what manliness or andreia might be under con-ditions where bravery might mean doing nothing with your body exceptwaiting, and sometimes not even with the “higher” manly knowledge ofsuperior purpose. Not surprisingly, it was a debate that tended to resolveitself, as in Plato’s Laches (a dialogue on the definition of manliness andcourage) in moral and epistemological gridlock.

Only on special occasions, therefore, could it be admitted, as in Peri-kles’ Funeral Oration on behalf of the Athenian war dead (430 b.c.e.),that those who had “lost” on the field of battle had, regardless of all oth-er personal flaws and impediments, acquired the courage of real men (an-dros aretê). Whatever moral failings and wrongs had stained the privatelives of these men, Perikles asserts, were now effaced by the good they hadachieved by their death. They had endured and stood their ground withtheir bodies (to d’ergon tô sômati hypemeinan) and so had arrived at theheight of glory (doxê).53 By basing their actions not on the shorter-termtemporal values of social status, privilege and wealth, but rather on thehope (elpis) of a long-term communitarian value, they had overcome. Butthe suggestive ideas and sentiments implicit in this interpretation of death


52. Loraux, “En guise de conclusion: Le naturel féminin dans l’histoire,” (in) Lesexpériences de Tirésias, 290 [“La cité, l’historien, les femmes,” Pallas 32 (1985): 8–39]5 The Experiences of Tiresias, 241, citing Plato, Laws 6.781.5—a rather revelatorytext.

53. Thuc. 2.42.4; the precise relationship of actions to virtues, and the combinationof these with exact political, material and ethical goals, is rather unclear, however, inthis “perhaps the single most difficult sentence” in all of Thucydides.

remained adumbrated and embedded in far more dominant values. Theywere carefully defined, and confined, until Greek men were faced with theconscious recognition that they themselves were now inferior, weak, pas-sive, and the victims of another’s successful aggression. Then a Polybiuscould begin to explore a line (later to be more forcefully and consciouslydeveloped by Posidonios in tandem with the ideology of Stoicism) thatvictims who had been soundly defeated but who could still endure mightalso be able to win.54 This was a long, slow, and sporadic emergence fromits former confines of a revised perspective on the values of weakness andendurance—a revision that had direct implications for the modes in whichgendered values and roles could be assessed and deployed.

What one sees reflected in texts like Fourth Maccabees, therefore, is theresult of a progressive loosening of rigid gender categories from their an-choring in the social hierarchies of the polis. It was this distancing, the at-tachment of the body as a subject to a distant natural cosmos, that con-tributed to new valuations of the body itself.55 The development of thesenew values could exploit a variety of existing moral discourses, includingthe traditional behaviour of a people that had learned the virtues of en-durance, and expressed them in an ideology of hope and expectation ofthe future.56 One typical manner in which these ideas were transferred tonew cultural contexts was quite literally by translation. In the Alexandri-an translation of the Tanakh into Greek the typical Hebrew terms indi-cating hope, expectation, suffering, and endurance were translated by theGreek verb hypomenô, and especially by its noun form, hypomonê.Whereas previously the verbal form had been almost the sole usage andit had been used to describe discrete actions or behaviors, the noun wasnow brought systematically into play to exalt “the thing itself” as a man-ifest and permanent ideal. It is in the Graeco-Judaic texts of the Hellenis-tic period, mainly in the so-called pseudepigrapha, that the abstract nounhypomonê first commonly appears as the specific designation of this elab-orated virtue.57 Reduced to its constituent elements, the bare word means“to remain underneath something” or “to lie beneath something.” It has


54. Polyb. 3.4.4–6.55. Brown, Body and Society, esp. 26–35, on how the “Judaism” of the period

posited a wholly different orientation of the mind-body duality within a cosmic monis-tic frame.

56. J. de Guibert, “Sur l’emploi d’Ãelpßv et de ses synonymes dans le nouveau testa-ment,” RevScRel 4 (1913): 565–69; C. Spicq, “‘Upomonh, Patientia,” RSPT 19 (1930):95–106; and A. M. Festugière, “Upomonh dans la tradition grecque,” RevScRel 21(1931): 477–87, a subject greatly neglected since these early studies, it seems.

57. In addition to the Testaments of Job and Joseph, see, e.g., the so-called Psalmsof Solomon.

strong connotations of proneness and hence of literal inferiority. Both, ofcourse, had strong implications for a gendered discourse.58

The ideology is reflected in a flotsam of writings, mostly contemporaryin time, including those by Jews in the Hellenistic diaspora like Philo whoadded Stoic conceptions to his Platonism in order to map the frontiers be-tween that which could and could not be endured, the writings of thepseudo-Andronikos who wrote a whole treatise on the subject, and earlyChristian writers such as Clement (also from Alexandria) who recognizedthe links of “patience” with karteria.59 When one considers the ideologyof endurance in Philo, however, it is manifest that it is placed in a com-pletely different field of meaning than the endurance of public torturewhich is our concern here. His deployment of hypomonê is allied to astruggle for self-perfection in which his main culture heroes are Abraham,Isaac, and Jacob—all of whom exemplify varying types of self-modera-tion or sacrifice in order to better themselves spiritually. His prime exam-ples of endurance in his own personal struggle to control his own passionsincluded “suffering” the absence of friends and family when he went ona retreat into the wilderness, and “enduring” the hubbub of urban crowdsand the pressures of extravagant dinner parties. In all these scenarios, hy-pomonê plays a marginal part in a story of almost purely personal con-cerns.60 Despite the overlap of some terminology and borrowed philo-sophical concepts, Philo’s program could hardly be more different fromthat set himself by the author of Fourth Maccabees—a tract that con-templates direct confrontation with powerful rulers in public and whichaccepts the torture of the human body as the paradigm of the problem ofsuffering and the definition of the self.

These developments were part of large and shifting, and therefore con-tested, innovations in moral patterns within which hypomonê was to ac-quire great significance in Pauline and New Testament ideology. Ratherearly on endurance was recognized as a behaviour that could be cultivat-


58. E. Goffman, Gender Advertisements (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1979), 41.

59. Festugière, “ÄUpomonh dans la tradition grecque,” 482–3; see Philo, Leg. Alleg.1.65 and 67 5 von Arnim, SVF, iii, 263; De Sept. et Fest. Dieb. 2 5 von Arnim, SVF,iii, 286; Clem. Strom. 2.8; and the anonymous treatise Äo protreptikov eÃiv Äupomonhn.

60. Some of this is apparent in the evidence from Philo that Aune, “Mastery of thePassions,” 126–34, retails—but he does not catch the absolute schism between thisworld and that of IV Macc. The differences are much greater than the fact that Philosuggests that most persons cannot attain a state of apatheia whereas IV Macc suggeststhat “complete mastery over the passions is possible” (p. 139); on the systematic back-ground, see M. Spanneut, “Apatheia ancienne, apatheia chrétienne: Ière partie, L’ap-atheia ancienne,” ANRW 2.36.7 (1994), 4641–4717.

ed and adopted to save oneself when faced by the forces of persecution.61

Paul explicitly lauded the virtue of subservience in his model of marriageas a type of mutual servitude, and in his model of the family as a slave-like institution embedded in a cosmic servile system, with God as the mas-ter and with the believers as his slaves (or emancipated children). He couldalso link it, as did the author of Fourth Maccabees, to the agonistic mod-el of the competitive disciplining of your body.62 To endure punishmentpassively, especially where it was undeserved, was actually honorablewhen it was done for a good purpose: “You see, there is honor in endur-ing the pains of undeserved punishment, if it is done for the sake ofGod . . . the particular honor in the sight of God is enduring punishmentspatiently when you are being punished for having done what is right.”63

Specifically linked, as it increasingly came to be, to the intensely definingcivic experiences of trial and torture, the ideology was going to have anear-perfect theatrical venue provided by the Roman state for its deploy-ment.

The connection between the witnessing of martyrdom and the virtue ofendurance is made evident in the letters of Ignatius, bishop of Antioch,written during the course of his passage under arrest to Rome where hewas to face execution in the arena. Ignatius had been condemned for “thename” and had been sentenced to die ad bestias. The conventional dateis about c.e. 108.64 The basic facts relating to Ignatius and the problemof martyrdom and body are manifest in his letters, especially that to theRomans. Most important is that Ignatius wished to die. Indeed, he ex-plicitly states that “I desire (or ‘love’) to suffer.”65 Throughout his lettersIgnatius identifies the core virtue of endurance (hypomonê) as resultingfrom the type of self-training that an athlete or a gladiator undergoes inorder to confront suffering.66 Endurance is seen as the means by whichthe individual human being can withstand not just the actual tortures and


61. Luke 21.19; Spicq, “ÄUpomonh, Patientia,” 102, who cites Philip Legrange: “Lesens de Äupomonh est l’endurance des persécutions. Si on cède, on perd la vie, si on ré-siste on l’acquierte, donc évidemment la vie éternelle.”

62. I Cor 9.24–27; again, appropriating existing values: V. C. Pfitzner, Paul and theAgon Motif: Traditional Athletic Imagery in Pauline Literature, SNT 16 (Leiden: Brill,1967), esp. 23–37.

63. I Pet 2.18–20: the discourse is on the obedience of slaves to their masters; theirendurance to unjust suffering is likened to the model of Christ. The whole letter is firm-ly set within a servile ideology.

64. Ign. Eph. 1.2–3.1 retails the basic facts of his conviction and sentence; the dateof 108 is assigned his martyrdom in the chronicle of Eusebius.

65. Ign. Trall. 4.1, a frank statement: Ãagapœw men gar to pajeœin. . . .66. Ign. Eph. 3.1.

bodily punishments of Roman executions in the arena, but also defeat theenemy who is identified with the Devil.67 This hypomonê is parallel to theendurance and suffering which Jesus had, and which God now has for usas “sinners.”68 Endurance is justified on the grounds of the achievementof a post-resurrection embodiment, a specific connection that leads Ig-natius virulently to oppose docetic views of Christ’s body. In an almostpathetic manner, he protests that it is not possible for him to accept anethereal disembodied view of Christ. Since it is Christ’s actual suffering inthe body that establishes the mimetic model for martyrs like himself, tohold that Christ’s suffering was only a “thought experience” is unaccept-able, indeed unthinkable. In Ignatius’ own words: “Why in that casewould I pray to do battle with the wild beasts? If that were true, I wouldbe dying in vain.”69

A meaningful death was the one thing that Ignatius was not willing toforfeit. Through the body Ignatius is able to link several images of suf-fering and endurance, but specifically that of a woman in childbirth towhom he compares the pains and sufferings endured by himself in orderto achieve a new birth.70 The topos of childbirth as an endurance of painwas an old one, but the hope engendered in it (if any) was the child bornof the woman, not, as in Ignatius’ case, the literal rebirth of one’s ownbody. This specifically Christian type of endurance was then re-attachedto the ability of the sufferer successfully to challenge the torturer, like thefictional woman Leukippê, to a duel of bodily strengths: “Let them comeat me—fire and cross and contests with wild beasts, cutting and tearingme apart, racking my bones, mangling my limbs, crushing my whole body,cruel tortures of the Devil.”71 Finally, in appealing to Paul’s classic defin-ition of love as “that which is able to endure all,” Ignatius is able to re-connect these novel conceptions to God and to re-anchor them in a tra-


67. Ign. Magn. 1.1: Ãen wÄœÓ ÄupomÝnontev thn pœasan Ãepçreian toœu Õarqontov toœuaÃiœwnov; Trall. 4.1: qrÞxw ouÃœn praüthtov, Ãen Äh katalýetai Äï Õarqwn toœu aÃiœwnovtoýtou. . . .

68. Ign. Pol. 3.1: mÜlista de Ôeneken jeoœu pÜnta ÄupomÝnein Ähmœav deœi, Ôina kai aÃutovÄhmœav ÄupomeßnŸ . . . (3.2) ton kata pÜnta trüpon diÃ Ähmœav Ôupomeßnanta. . . .

69. Ign. Trall. 10: eÃi gar, Ôwsper Õajeoi ‰ontev, toutÝstin Õapistoi, lÝgousin todokeœin peponjÝnai aÃutün, aÃutoi ‰ontev to dokeœin, Ãegœw tß dÝdemai; tß de kai e‰uqomaijhriomaqœhsai; dwrean oœun Ãapojnhskw. ‰ara oœun katayeýdomai toœu kurßou.

70. Ign. Rom. 6.1–2: o toketüv moi Ãepßkeitai. The metaphor was already present inthe NT: Acts 2.24: Ãwdœinev toœu janÜtou; and again at Galatians 4.19: tÝkna mou, o¤uvpÜlin Ãwdßnw. . . .

71. Ign. Rom. 5.3: pœur kai staurov, jhrßwn te sustÜseiv, Ãanatomai, diairÝseiv,skorpismoi ÃostÝwn, sugkopai melœwn, Ãalesmoi Âolou toœu sþmatov, kakai kolÜseivtoœu diabülou ÃepÃ Ãeme ÃerqÝsjwsan. . . .

ditional Jewish conception of a divinity who for the sake of the individ-ual believer is able to “endure everything.”72 The very conception of thedivinity itself has thereby been almost imperceptibly altered and made toexalt the passive in His nature.

PATIENCE IN A ROMAN WORLD

By the end of the first century b.c.e., these words and ideas had suffi-ciently permeated the Roman world to allow a high-ranking man like Cic-ero to identify hypomonê with the Latin patientia.73 In this strategic re-deployment one can find a conscious interweaving of elements derivedfrom traditional Jewish and Hellenistic popular milieux, with those de-rived from the élitist ideologies of city-state and empire. In this dialecti-cal process, Stoic ideology had a special place. It is no accident that Mu-sonius Rufus could write deliberately about a woman’s ability to controlher body just like that of a man, and thereby “to think of death not as anevil . . . and likewise not to shun hardship . . . so that it is likely that sucha woman will be energetic and strong in the endurance of pain.” What ismore, such a woman would “not be willing to submit to anything shame-ful because of fear of death or unwillingness to suffer hardship, and shewould not be intimidated by anyone because he is of noble birth, power-ful or wealthy—no, not even if he were the tyrant of her city.”74 As anélite ideologue, Musonius read all of this backwards, so to speak. Hiswomen are able to possess and develop a faculty of courage “just likemen,” but all this newfound “manliness” (andreia) of theirs is directed to-wards the quite traditional roles of being able to endure domestic house-work and to protect the sexual honor of their household for their hus-bands’ sake. Still, it is significant that “womanly” courage and enduranceare serious problems for him, and that feminine endurance and resolvewere coming to be equated in some sense with the positive value of man-liness.

Finally, extensive contemplations of the conceptions of endurance andpatience came, by mid-century, to characterize the philosophical writings


72. Ign. Smryn. 9.2: Ãapünta me kai parünta Ãhgaphsate. Ãameßboi Äumœin jeüv, diÃ ÂonpÜnta ÄupomÝnontev aÃutoœu teýxesje.

73. Cic. Tusc. Disp. 4.24.53, crediting Chrysippos (von Arnim, SVF, iii, 285).74. Musonius Rufus 3–4; C. E. Lutz, “Musonius Rufus: The Roman Socrates,” YCS

10 (1947): 3–147, at 42–43. The verb ÄupomÝnw is used in both passages. It should bepointed out that Foucault substantially distorts the extent to which Musonius’ claimsrelapsed on, and underwrote, quite traditional roles and values: “The Wife,” pt. 5 (in)The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, 147–85.

of Seneca, a Roman who was almost the exact contemporary of Jesus andPaul (he was born perhaps a year or two after the former, and died bywhat was an imposed self-execution a few years before the latter was ex-ecuted at Rome). Seneca discusses endurance and patience again andagain, but primarily within the context of two species of bodily sufferingand pain: illness (a personal affliction) and torture (a public misfortune).In fact, Seneca’s repeated conscious discussion of the imminence andthreat of torture are probably the first texts, and certainly first pre-Chris-tian ones, to do so extensively. The most expansive and conscious delib-erations on the nexus of pain, torture and endurance/patience are to befound in his philosophical letters. The literary form in which this discus-sion is borne, a vicarious form of diarization—one which took what wasformerly a genre used for private communication as a mode for public dis-course—is in itself highly significant. We might first consider a typical pas-sage from one of the earlier letters in which he established a distance be-tween one and one’s body (one only has a sort of guardianship or tutelaover it).75 He then specifies three sorts of attack the body will have to en-dure: (i) want (e.g., hunger), (ii) sickness, and (iii) violence directed againstit by stronger persons. Whereas (i) and (ii) are silent, it is the very public-ity of the third threat (by which Seneca clearly envisages only torture) thatmakes it the most feared—because it is usually applied in the context ofthe uproar of a crowd and in front of public onlookers.76

The other evil [viz., of torture, rather than natural illness] is a great publicdisplay. Surrounding it are swords and torches, chains and a fury of wild ani-mals, which it sets loose on the disemboweled innards of humans. Imagineseeing in this place the prison, the crosses, the horses of torture (eculei), themetal claw, the stake driven right through the middle of a man until it pro-trudes through his mouth, limbs torn in opposite directions by chariotwheels, that infamous shirt laced and dipped with flammable substances—and other barbaric things that I have not mentioned. It is not surprising thatour greatest fear is of this spectacle, the variety of whose instruments is sogreat and machinery of which is so terrible. Just as the torturer accomplishes


75. Sen. Ep. 14 (the specific argument here is from 14.1).76. Sen. Ep. 14.4–6: Ingens alterius mali pompa est; ferrum circa se et ignes habet

et catenas et turbam ferarum, quam in viscera inmittat humana. Cogita hoc loco car-carem et cruces et eculeos et uncum et adactum per medium hominem, qui per osemergeret, stipitem et distracta in diversum actis curribus membra, illam tunicam ali-mentis ignium et inlitam et textam, et quicquid aliud praeter haec commenta saevitiaest. Non est itaque morum, si maximus huius rei timor est cuius et varietas magna etapparatus terribilis est. Nam quemadmodum plus agit tortor, quo plura instrumentadoloris exposuit (specie enim vincuntur qui patientiae restitissent); ita ex iis quae ani-mos nostros subigunt et domant plus proficiunt, quae habent quod ostendant.

more, the more he displays his instruments of pain and suffering (indeed byshow alone those who would have resisted him with endurance are beaten),in the same way, out of the range of things that subdue and domesticate ourminds, those are most effective that have aspects which they can display.

In this passage, as in many others, Seneca explicitly speaks of endurance(patientia) as a means of resisting the inroads of torture on the body. Buthe recognizes the paradoxical nature of passive resistance as a virtue. Fur-thermore, the specific ways in which the apparent coherence with the mar-tyrological texts is broken are several. First, Seneca ranks patience as asecondary virtue—one that only becomes apparent in conditions of ad-versity.77 He further notes that it is a “feminine” virtue, comparing thevirtue of endurance under torture to the joy acquired from enduring thepain of childbirth.78

In terms of difference, however, it is more significant to note that Senecacrafts his vivid descriptions of the afflictions vented on the body to sup-port a forceful argument that we should assiduously shun dangerous sit-uations that might threaten us with the imposition of these tortures. Weought to avoid provoking the powerful and not make ourselves an objectof attention to those who might wish to harm us. The real danger is death.For Seneca, the linkage of patience with a transcendent value of a renewedbody is blocked by the fact that the measured end, the modus, is a per-manent physical end. Endurance and patience, therefore, have their ownabsolute physical limits. In an inversion of the Christian connection be-tween patience and death compelled upon him by the “recoil effect” ofthat absolute limit, Seneca must assert that one will cease to fear whenone ceases to hope.79 The theme is picked up in another letter devoted tothe subject (Ep. 66) in which Seneca, by setting up an imagined adversary,attempts to defend the passive virtue of endurance. He puts the questiondirectly to his interlocutor: Does he consider that the manliness or brav-ery (virtus) of one who endures a siege with the greatest of endurance isthe same as one who actively attacks an enemy emplacement?80 The ob-jection is that there must be some distinction between the pleasure (gaudi-um) of the latter and the condition of “unyielding endurance of pain.”Seneca’s counter is that there is no difference in substance; the only dif-ference is in the way they are displayed or shown.

It is also important to understand the moral context in which Seneca


77. Sen. Ep. 66.36; 71.17.78. Sen. Ep. 28.14.79. Sen. Ep. 2.80. Sen. Ep. 66.12: Quid? Tu non putas parem esse virtutem eius, qui obsidionem

patientissime sustinet?

evaluates this virtue of endurance. He appeals to the cases of gladiatorswho killed themselves rather than suffer humiliation. It is a matter of hon-or, which is the highest measurement of virtue.81 Therefore, mere en-durance is not enough. It is the public face of such endurance that mat-ters. In a letter ostensibly devoted to the problem of enduring illness (Ep.67), most of Seneca’s examples are in fact focused on the body under pub-lic torture. He makes the point that it is not mere endurance, but braveendurance that counts as a virtue. The problem for Seneca is that suchbravery is seen by the dominant values of his time to be “womanish.” Theway he counters this is, once again, to deviate from his ostensible prima-ry deployment of endurance in illness to the more striking cases of en-durance by athletes and by those who are suffering political torture. First,he notes that although athletes endure enormous bodily punishment, theydo not do so merely because they are fighting (he is clearly envisaging themartial contests) but in order that they might fight better. The distinctionmight seem picayune, but it does transfer the endurance from a passive toan active mode, and therefore removes from it the stigma of being “wom-anish”: “Quid ergo? Non sentis si illum muliebriter tuleris?” Secondly, hecompares the type of training one undergoes to fight better in an athleticcontest to the active role that the passive sufferer can assume under tor-ture. One can win by smiling as one experiences overwhelming pain; themore the torturer applies tortures, the more your body can actually chal-lenge the torturer. One can speak with the refusal of silence.82

Even more [terrible and frightening] are the firebrands, the horse of torture(eculeus), the burning plates, and the instruments that re-open swollenwounds and which drive their tracks even deeper into the body. But there aremen who have not uttered so much as a groan under these tortures. “It’s notenough,” [says the torturer]. The tortured man has made no request. “It’s notenough.” He has not spoken a word. “It’s not enough.”

In his frequent, if anguished, self-debates over the problem of torture,suffering, and patience, Seneca grapples with most of the critical elementsof the novel ideology, but is resistant, as one would expect, to the finalconquest of torture and death by a literal, renewed life-after-death and abodily resurrection. His is a more mundane recognition of the hard phys-ical limits or modus of a corporeal body and an equally corporeal spirit.

There is a second face to this movement in values that is not as evidentin Seneca as elsewhere. The simultaneous rise to a position of predomi-nance of the more conscious recognition of feminine or “weak” virtues


81. Sen. Ep. 70.8–9; 20–26 and 2782. Sen. Ep. 78.15–19, at 19.

and the problematization of women in terms analogous to those usuallyset for men is found in a wide range of ideological writings between theRoman Musonius and the Greek Plutarch. The coincident fascinationcannot be accidental.83 The linkage also had connections with a new dis-course on body that envisaged a spirituality that was more somatic, andwhich was therefore concerned with the experience of recurrent corporealpain. The conscious deployment and extraction of the ideology, however,moved simultaneously along two lines. Firstly, certain elements of it werenot absolutely new; there were indeed traditional strands of argument dis-cernible in its development. But the isolation and elevation of passivepower and resistance to a position of centrality in written texts, and theforging of one of the central pillars of moral guidance for men, requiredwholly new emphases and degrees of consciousness. The act of passivitybecame a deliberative action for men, a choice they could make; forwomen it remained, as it had always been, a constant role. They alwayshad to practice endurance as a simple on-going role embedded in the ex-perience of their daily life, including the not inconsequential aspect of hav-ing to meet domestic and social violence.84 The crossover was provokedby the split “presentations of the self” in which men had one experienceand women two.85 As has been perceptively remarked upon, this new talkabout the body is actually a discourse on a discourse: it is a way male writ-ers could use the female body as a corporeal means of interpreting theirworld, including forms of resistance to it, and hence no different than theline of sight extending from the writer of Fourth Maccabees, through thenovelist Achilles Tatius, to the saintly Jerome.86


83. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 3; with comments by Averil Cameron,“Redrawing the Map: Early Christian Territory after Foucault,” JRS 76 (1986):266–71, who connects the increasing “privatization of public life” (leading to the con-centration on the affective economy of the married couple, p. 267) with the ends ofthis new ideology: “The other side of a repressive discourse about women, and the lim-itation on and heightened self consciousness about one’s own [sc. male?] sexual prac-tice, is of course to glorify a female figure who can be made to represent the ultimatein submission” (p. 270).

84. N. Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life inBrazil (Berkeley-Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1992), with fine at-tention to the assumed roles of women.

85. In Scott’s terms (Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 44), slaves, like women,have a strong experience of both public and private transcripts; cf. Winkler, “DoubleConsciousness in Sappho’s Lyrics,” ch. 6 (in) The Constraints of Desire, 162–87, esp.174 f.

86. C. Bynum, “The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages,”(in) M. Feher, R. Naddaff and N. Tazi, eds., Fragments for a History of the HumanBody, vol. 1 (New York: Zone, 1989), 161–219, at 162, 165–66, 167–68.

By the turn of the second century in the Latin West, a comprehensiveand coherent exposition of the new ideology of patience was capable ofelucidation. This patience was integrally linked to a body image that, asthe very word “passion” itself indicates, referred simultaneously to phys-ical pain and to the physical sensations of erotic pleasure. Even the latterpassion was not neutral in its meaning, but was heavily freighted as it wentthrough shifts in erotic significances. Through the late Republic and ear-ly empire, the term “to suffer” when applied to the experience of sexualintercourse was very negative in its connotations, a negativity that repre-sented a continuity of sexual valuations developed in the context of theclassic Greek city-state.87 It usually signified a man (the pathicus) whosuffered or endured an aggressive sexual attack on his body, who was thepassive recipient of intercourse and so was acting “like a woman.”88 Thebehaviour of patientia or endurance was therefore rather bad, in fact oneof the worst faults that could mark a man’s behaviour and character.89

The sexual sufferer or endurer, the pathicus, was an effeminate male, atraitor to his existence on two counts. The verb sustinere (“to sustain, towithstand”) was used to describe the patience with which his body hadto accept a sexual assault on it.90 In this same age, however, the virtue ofpatience (patientia) was one of the greatest that could be ascribed to awoman. It features prominently in the effusive praise of the virtues of hisnoble wife in the late Republic by her grateful husband.91 Over the courseof the first centuries of the empire, however, the noun passio (also derivedfrom the same verb “to suffer”) came to have a positive valuation to re-fer to the “passionate” experience of heterosexual intercourse, where the


87. M. Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), passim; note p. 4, n. 11, quoting Sen.Con. 10, praef. 10–11, for a pun on the name of one Passienus: “Ille Passieno prima eiussyllaba in Graecum mutata obscenum nomen imposuit”; p. 82 for another striking ex-ample. In the Greek world the association of passive endurance (Äupomonh, ÄupomÝnein)is associated with condemnations of passivity in male homosexual acts in secular legalsources well into the Byzantine period, see Ecologa 17.38 5 L. Burgmann, ed., Eclo-ga: Das Gesetzbuch Leons III. und Konstantinos V. FBR, no. 10 (Frankfurt: Löwen-klau, 1983), 238–39 (from the mid-eighth century C.E.); and S. Troianos, “Kirchlicheund weltliche Rechtsquellen zur Homosexualität in Byzanz,” JOByz 39 (1989): 29–48.

88. Adams, Latin Sexual Vocabulary, 123, 133, 189–90, 223, 228; Richlin, Gardenof Priapus, 92, 146, 202, 220–22. M. Gleason, “The Semiotics of Gender,” and theworks noted in no. 26 above.

89. On the noun “patience” or “endurance,” see Adams, Latin Sexual Vocabulary,190, citing Sen. Quaest.Nat. 1.16.6 and Petr. Sat. 9.6 (muliebris patientiae).

90. Adams, Latin Sexual Vocabulary, 192, on inclino (“to lie down , and take it. ”)for pathic intercourse, citing the SJuv. 2.21: “inclinatum ad stuprum et sustinentem.”

91. In the so-called Laudatio Turiae 1.35, 2.21, 51, 66 and 69; see E. Ramage,Athenaeum 82 (1994): 341–70.

inferior role was properly played by a woman and in which the man ex-perienced his rightful pleasure. This passion was good. In his writings, theChristian ideologue Tertullian commonly employed the word, and so wasable to play on the dual meanings of passio as sexual pleasure in hetero-sexual intercourse and as the physical suffering of the body. In a paralleldevelopment, patientia, the endurance of suffering, was coming to have apositive rather than negative valuation.

A patience (patientia) that enclosed both suffering and endurance—theability passively to hold out, often in the hope of better, became the car-dinal virtue of Christians under threat. The ideology and its attendantnovel terminology is strewn throughout the works of Tertullian, but isconsciously and clearly explicated in a treatise he devoted to the subject:De Patientia.92 In it Tertullian clearly distinguishes this endurance fromthe previous non-Christian sense of patience.93 He envisages a striking im-age of this endurance as a feminine being. He imagines patientia as awoman in dress and deportment—demure, shy, withdrawn, passive—thealumna or foster child of god.94 Tertullian accept that this was, indeed,not just a female, but also a servile virtue—the sort of behaviour and prac-tice that was inculcated in slaves, and to which they became inured inshowing due respect to their masters.95 In explicating its specific meaningTertullian was able to appeal to the charter of the Sermon on the Mount,where it was foretold that the poor and the weak would inherit the King-dom of God.96 Moreover, by linking it to the vision of patience in thePauline charter which held that love is that which is able to endure all,Tertullian could merge the two senses of passion into a more coherent andlogical whole.97

Patience or the simple ability to outlast the persecutor was also inex-tricably linked to the other “feminine” virtue of hope—hope for a betterlife, a divine promise of what was there for the patient, if only one couldwait. This quasi-millennial expectation gave a larger, more-than-person-al element to Christian endurance. It was the new body that would ben-efit from a reversal of present conditions. No pain, no suffering: the bodywould become impatient. The Apocalypse of John envisages this tran-


92. CSEL 76.140 f. 5 CCL 1.319 f., usually dated to 198–203.93. Tert. Pat. 16, esp. 16.1.94. Tert. Pat. 15.95. Tert. Pat. 4.1–4.96. Tert. Pat. 11.5–9; that is to say, the emergence of a hidden transcript ideology

of “the poor” that espoused different values and aspirations from those of the élite ide-ology.

97. Tert. Pat. 12.9–10; see I Cor 13.4–13.

scendent state when “he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, thereshall be no more death, no more grief, crying, or pain—for those earlierthings will have passed away.”98 These linkages—a patience grounded inendurance, a transcendent paradise, death, and hope—were consciouslyenunciated in the generation before Tertullian in the word attributed tothe martyr Justin.99 Tertullian argues that this patientia or endurance isof supreme importance to mind and body—it is through it that one be-comes the lord and master of one’s body. The twin disciplines that areneeded are those of control of food (diet) and then the higher and moredifficult control of sexual desires.100 Thus prepared, the body can battleagainst persecutors, can bear up under the harshness of imprisonment, ofbeatings and chains. Nothing more than sheer endurance of the body isrequired, he claims, to experience the blissful happiness of the second bap-tism. When one is master of one’s body through patience, then one canhold out against every physical threat directed against it—whips, fire, thecross, wild beasts and . . . the sword.101

The ideology became increasingly formalized in the mid-third centuryin the midst of the first systematic empire-wide persecutions of Christiansordered by the emperors Decius and Valerian. The course of these attackson bodies (more powerful and thorough than earlier, sporadic efforts)concomitantly empowered martyrs and confessors on a new scale—onethat openly threatened their hierarchy of public ecclesiastical power.Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, himself martyred at the end of this renewedpersecution (in 258) delivered a monitory talk on the new problems. Itwas entitled “On the Good of Endurance” (De bono patientiae).102

Cyprian was under considerable pressure to define a role for the body inthis power struggle—to constrain it to acceptable ends in terms of a Chris-tian ecclesiology and, simultaneously, to maintain and harness its pres-


98. Rev 7.17; and esp. 21.1–4, beginning “Then I saw a new heaven and a newearth.”

99. Justin was asked by Rusticus, the Praefectus Urbi: “If you are whipped and thenbeheaded, do you believe that you are going to ascend to heaven?” Justin’s reply is(Rec.A 5.2): ÃElpßzw Ãektœhv Äupomonœhv Ãean Äupomeßnw. (Rec.B 5.2 has much the samewording); see no. 4 (in) G. Krüger & G. Ruhbach, eds., Ausgewählte Märtyrerakten4

(Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr-Paul Siebeck, 1965), 15–18, at § 5.2 (p. 17).100. Tert. Pat. 13, on a crudely corporeal control—echoing Pauline themes.101. Tert. Pat. 13.8.102. Cyprian, De bono patientiae (CSEL 3.3), 397–415; J. Molager, ed., Cyprien

de Carthage: A Donat [et] La Vertu de Patience, SC 291 (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1982);composed towards 255, and under the influence of Tertullian’s ideas. In comment, seeM. Spanneut, “Patience et temps chez saint Cyprien de Carthage,” (in) Littérature etReligion: Mélanges offerts à M. le Chanoine Joseph Copin 5 Mélanges de scienceréligieuse, suppl. vol. 23 (Lille, 1966), 7–11.

ence to confront the real threat of persecution. Cyprian addressed hisparishioners in a repetitious and hammering verbal assault. Christian en-durance, he argued, must be distinguished from the false patience of thephilosophers. Their endurance is displayed for the virtue of the self,whereas “ours,” asserts Cyprian, is marked by humility and softness.Christian endurance was self-abnegating to the point of slavishness sincein fact “we are the sons and slaves of the father and the lord.”103

Cyprian’s patience is partially modeled on (and contributes to) a ty-pology offered by Christ who always “offered the other cheek” and whoendured all physical insults to his body. In Cyprian’s ideological recon-struction, however, the voice of woman is systematically “read out” of theexplanation. It is the patriarchs who were the progenitors of the Chris-tian ideal. The vox muliebris is introduced to the argument only to explainhow and why endurance had to become the normal mode of all humanexistence.104 It is at this point in his argument that Cyprian introduces thesecond motif of Christian patience: the ability of the persecuted to endurenot only the present attacks on them, but also to wait both for the betterlife that awaited them—and also for revenge.105 For those who are pa-tient the day will come, he promises, when the great judge will return inanger and establish the final court in which he will mete out just punish-ment to all his enemies. The monotonous density of the text that presseshome on virtually every other line the terms of endurance (patior, pati-entia), of bearing up (sustinere, sustinentia), and of suffering and for-bearance (toleror, tolerantia), matches the force with which this patiencehad become the ideological and behavioral pivot of the Christian body.

Set against this Christian body were parallel developments in converg-ing tendencies to explicating a common problem of body and power(though within distinct social nexus). Some of these other possibilities areperhaps best exemplified by the intense somatic contemplations of AeliusAristides.106 It is an ideology in which, as it has been put, “the emphasison pain and suffering reflects a widespread cultural concern of the periodthat used representations of bodily pain and suffering to construct a new


103. Cypr. Bon. pat. 1–3.104. Cypr. Bon. pat. 11, 18; beginning with the vox mulieris tuae (of Eve, of course).105. Cypr. Bon. pat. 21–24.106. J. Perkins, “The ‘Self’ as Sufferer,” HTR 85 (1992): 245–72 [“Ideology, not

Pathology,” ch. 7 (in) The Suffering Self: Pain and Representation in the Early Chris-tian Era (London-New York: RKP, 1995), 173–99]; to which, however, must be addedthe research of Danielle Gourevitch, “La maladie comme preuve d’existence: L’aven-ture d’Aelius Aristide et ses interprétations,” ch. 1.1 (in) Le triangle hippocratique dansle monde gréco-romaine: Le malade, sa maladie et son médecin (Paris-Rome: Ecolefrançaise de Rome, 1984), 17–59.

subjectivity of the human person.”107 The strong somatization of thedream messages dispatched to Aristides by his god, and meticulouslyrecorded by himself in an immense diary, presents us with a manifest caseof identity, a subjectivity, created around the suffering body. But the pa-tient thus constructed marked a significant departure from the externalcivic definition of the man as self. Submission, suffering, and heroic en-durance are now linked to a careful contemplation of one’s own body. Thediscourse in which Aristides is engaged, however, is distinctively his own,and is located in a realm ideas and rhetoric separate from that of theChristian ideologues. Not once does he express himself in the elaborateideology (or attendant jargon) of hypomonê or its implicit political di-mensions.108 Never once does Aristides read the terms of his bodily ar-gument back into the sphere of the “public transcript” where it might con-ceivably be used as leverage against a threatening public authority. On thecontrary, his ideology seems only to signal a rather painful implosion in-wards on the physical self.

THE BODY

The increasing prominence of this particular discourse of the body, of ac-tive resistance through the patient body, is significant since its deploymentwas coterminous with a crisis impending on the Roman state. Since theproblems were being contested in small settings in a myriad local socialmilieux, the degree of awareness that state officials had of them is uncer-tain. The confrontation, however, was a critical one that struck at the ide-ological foundations of the state’s social order. Such challenges had to bemet with a finality in which the state publicly demonstrated its superiorpower by physically breaking the undesirable behaviour of recalcitrantsubjects. Because of the way these trials and executions were staged, thebody became central to demonstrations of power. A further reason hasbeen noted:109

. . . at particular moments when there is within a society a crisis of belief—that is, when some central idea or ideology or cultural construct has ceased toelicit a population’s belief either because it is manifestly fictitious or becauseit has for some reason been divested of ordinary forms of substantiation—the


107. Perkins, “The ‘Self’ as Sufferer,” 246.108. He simply does not use the technical vocabulary; this is allied to the observa-

tions, for example, of Perkins, “The ‘Self’ as Sufferer,” 255 f., on the place of bodilycontemplation and the type of self that Aristides is constructing.

109. E. Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Ox-ford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 14.


sheer material factualness of the human body will be borrowed to lend thatcultural construct the aura of ‘realness’ and ‘certainty.’

For those who came as spectators to this public drama, torture and thesystematic rending of the body was needed to reveal the individual sub-ject’s feebleness, to exact a terrible public vengeance for non-complianceand to produce the truth.

The problem was that actual bodies were caught up on crisscrossing,and immensely contradictory discourses of power. The Roman state hadits own, as did its local officials (mainly, in these cases, the provincial gov-ernors), as did local communities, and the various ethnic and class groupswithin them, and the persons who were Christians. Every trial was there-fore a matter of fixing identities. Both identification and the attendantconfession took the form of a series of “I am” statements. The protocolof any trial and interrogation began with the formal question of “Whoare you?” and “What’s your status?”110 The permanent institutionalvenues within and through which these confrontations were to be playedout were also various, disaggregated, and firmly embedded in local cul-tural environments. Therefore, a basic conclusion now widely conceded:for a long period, extending at least over a century and a half, incidentsof persecution were sporadic, uncertain, haphazard and dispersed throughodd local venues in the empire. It took a long time before the Roman stateat state level arrived at the idea and practice of a general state-orderedpersecution of the whole.111 The power relationships that came into playin any given local instance were not uniform or wholly predictable. Theretherefore existed a considerable range of negotiation in what would ac-tually happen—a situation of which Christians were well aware.

In writing a monitory letter in c.e. 212 to P. Julius Scapula, the Romangovernor of Africa, Tertullian was already able to map out a range ofknown alternatives in the repertoire. He could catalogue past variationsin confrontations between Christian defendants and provincial judges.

110. G. A. Bisbee, Pre-Decian Acts of Martyrs and Commentarii (Philadelphia:Fortress Press, 1988); e.g., the Gesta apud Zenophilum: “Quis vocaris?” “Cuius condi-cionis es?” “Cuius dignitas es?”—they are the standard questions meant to establishidentity (CSEL 26.185–97, at p. 185); a scenario that was profoundly fixed in dreamsequences of self-identification: see Jerome, Ep. 22.30.3–5 (CSEL 54.190–91) and no.115 below.

111. T. D. Barnes, “Legislation Against the Christians,” JRS 58 (1968): 32–50 5 ch.2 (in) Early Christianity and the Roman Empire (London: Variorum, 1984): a turningpoint in our understanding of the structure and tempo of persecutions in the empire.

The governor could coach the defendant as to how to reply so as to makethe case one that was legally dismissable. Or, since the governor was gen-erally responsible for a larger law and order in the society as a whole, hecould simply decide to dismiss the case on the basis that it was likely tocause a greater social disturbance that it was worth. Or, having alreadyentered into a case and then sensing that he was needlessly becoming toodeeply involved in complex local disputes, he might seek to divest himselfof the problem—like the governor C. Iulius Asper who “having only mod-erately tortured a man, took him down from the instruments and did notcompel him to sacrifice.” Asper confessed to his legal advisers that he wasupset with himself that he had ever become involved in the case in the firstplace. Or the governor could resist local pressures by using the groundsof “a lack of proper procedures.” Thus after “shaking down” one defen-dant and having acquired some evidence from him, the governor dis-missed the case, cutting short his initial statement of charges (elogium) onthe basis that there was no formal accuser present and, according to hismandate, he would not proceed under such circumstances. The knownspaces and possibilities for resistance in this social narrative, from pointof arrest onwards, were therefore well known.112 As long as Christianswould not play their part governors always had to balance a whole set ofcountervailing pressures against any good that was likely to eventuate forthem from their trial, torture, and execution.

We know that at least some Christians did not behave in public like thecriminals they were supposed to be. Such criminal behavioral symptomswere well known and signaled in public by a pervasive body language ofself-abasement: blushing, sweating, signs of fear and shame, shuffling,bowing, scraping, signs of repentance and remorse, weeping, and soon.113 That was the behavior of persons who were convinced of their ownguilt by the overpowering rituals of court and “awe of the law” withwhich they were faced. The Christians’ bodily symptoms, movements,and gestures, however, did not signal guilt but rather the reverse, andhence were an implicit condemnation of the whole system.114 Indeed, the


112. Tert. Scap. 4.3 f.113. Tert. Apol. 1.10–13, and his discussion the emotions of timor, pudor, ter-

giversatio, paenitentia and deploratio ordinarily displayed by accused persons.114. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 203–06, on the distinction. Con-

text would dictate whether these bodily acts would be interpreted as conscious and de-liberate, and not an “accidental” miscue that could be overlooked by the authorities—but, in most cases, by the point they were fixed in the formal confrontation of a trial,it would be too late to overlook the all-too-obvious significance of public demeanor ofthis sort.

mere position of the body in space was important as a signifier of hierar-chies of power. In the displays of trial and punishment, it was literallyplaced lower: the governor and his assistants, the judges, were seated ona high tribunal—the defendants were kept at ground level with the crowdof spectators and had to mount the stairs of a separate platform (pulpi-tum, catasta) in order to be brought to the level of the governor for ques-tioning and sentencing. This prostration of the body signified in itself, anddifferentials of height between defendants and judges subliminally im-pressed itself even on consciously resisting Christians.115

That is to say, a physically lower position, having the body down, onits knees, or prone to the ground, was taken in itself to indicate servilityand inferiority, weakness rather than power. Therefore, a physical posi-tion closer to the ground was implicitly regarded as being morally inferi-or and bad. The connection between bodily position and moral evalua-tion, and the revolution in values connected with valuing the inferior, thehumble, the womanly, that which merely accepts and endures (from aprone position) is clearly indicated by the history of the words that wereused to describe being low to the ground or prone—tapeinos and alliedterms (meaning low, prone, close to the ground, and consistently associ-ated with being poor, weak, insignificant, and womanly).116 In this case(unlike the verbal debates over hypomenein) there was never any confu-sion or vacillation of an absolute frontier of meaning by the ideologues ofthe classical city-state and their heirs. The almost palpable association ofmoral status and bodily position was so strong and so inalterable that theclassical conceptions that pervaded the thought-world of the Greek polisand all its successor ideologies surrendered no ground on this matter. Tobe tapeinos was to be weak, poor, submissive, slavish, womanish, andtherefore had an indelible connection with shame, humiliation, degrada-tion and, inexorably, with that which was morally bad. The words whenused by the LXX, Philo, and Josephus never waver from these funda-mental and basic meanings. It is the Christian writings of the New Testa-ment that revolutionize these values wholly by their total inversion. Paulboasts of his self-abasement and humility, and draws attention to the ef-


115. Goffman, Gender Advertisements, 40. For dreams of Christian martyrs inwhich the height of the tribunal of the judge becomes an overpowering image, see themartyrdom of Marianus and Jacobus, no. 15 (in) Krüger & Ruhbach, AusgewählteMärtyrerakten4, 67–74, at ch. 6, pp. 69–70; cf. Jerome’s dream, Ep. 22.30.3–5 (CSEL54.190–91) for much the same effect.

116. H. Grundmann, “tapeinüv, tapeinüw, tapeßnwsiv, tapeinüfrwn,tapeinofronsýnh,” TDNT 8 (1972/1975), 1–26.

fort one must make to strive towards the final virtue that should beclaimed by the Christian, that of being tapeinos. Indeed, he actually cre-ates a new virtue—tapeinosophrunê (tapeinosofrýnh)—the voluntaryabasement of the self and one’s body.117 To be low, base, prone, and ex-posed was now at the heart of the definition of being good.

This takes us, full circle, to the scene of execution so vividly describedby Jerome at the head of this paper and which systematically attachedbodily position and location to the more general gender/erotic system ofhonor in his world. The condemned woman, on her knees, her hands tiedbehind her back and sword placed to throat, was to suffer not just theobliteration of her body, but simultaneously to enact a violent sexualmetaphor. The man who held his sword at her throat, threatened her iden-tity to assert his, ended her being to further his. This was not just an actof bare physical violence or coercion. It was also the sexual assertion ofa social order. If this much is not guaranteed by Jerome’s duplicitouswords, it is revealed in scenarios of a more overtly erotic/violent naturefound in the curse tablets and clay figurine “voodoo dolls” deployed byunrequited lovers of the time. One of these pieces is particularly disturb-ing to modern eyes, since it is shocking to turn the page of an academicbook, or journal, to find oneself confronted with the figurine of a womanwhose body is being cruelly pierced by no less than thirteen sharp bronzeneedles.118 The librettos that accompanied such dolls makes clear the sig-nificance of the enactment of the same bodily positions, movements, andviolence reported so pruriently by Jerome.119

Take wax [or clay] from a potter’s wheel and make two figures, a male and afemale. Make the male in the form of Ares fully armed, holding his sword inhis left hand and threatening to plunge it into the right side of her throat.And make her with arms behind her back and down on her knees. . . .(296–303)


117. Elsewhere only in Epictetus 3.24.56.118. P. du Bourguet, “Ensemble magique de la periode romaine en Egypte?” La Re-

vue du Louvre 25 (1975): 255–57, cf. the reproduction in J. Gager, Curse Tablets andBinding Spells from the Ancient World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), no.27, pp. 94–97, and fig. 13, p. 98; the accompanying text: S. Kambitsis, “Une nouvelletablette magique d’Egypte,” BIFAO 76 (1976): 213–30 5 SEG 26, no. 1717. Twomore figurines of this type have been noted subsequently: C. Faraone, “Binding andBurying the Forces of Evil: The Defensive Use of ‘Voodoo Dolls’ in Ancient Greece,”CA 10 (1991): 165–205 (pls. 1–13, 206–220), p. 204, no. 27.

119. K. Preisendanz, ed., Papyri Graecae Magicae: Die griechische Zauberpapyri,1 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1928), IV.296–466 (pp. 82–86) 5 H. D. Betz, tr., The Greek Mag-ical Papyri in Translation, including the Demotic Spells (Chicago: The University ofChicago Press, 1986), 44–46.

The scene manages to mix threatened violence, execution and a stream ofdouble entendres hinting at fellatio/irrumatio.120 What follows is, quiteliterally, writing on the body as the man who is seeking to control thewoman writes fabulous and threatening curses on each part of her anato-my—including, above all, her name and her mother’s name on her breasts.Fearsome demonic forces of the night and underworld are summoned.The woman is to be compelled, bound, forced and driven. She is to be cutoff sexually from any other:

Let her be in love with me, ‘x,’ whom she, ‘x,’ bore. Let her not be had in apromiscuous way, let her not be had in the ass, nor let her do anything withany other man for pleasure, just with me alone. . . . (351–53)

The parallels with Jerome’s vignette follow as we discover that what is be-ing encouraged is adultery. To this end, violent force is to be used:

. . . do not allow her, ‘x,’ to accept for pleasure the attempt of another man,not even that of her own husband, just that of mine, ‘x.’ Instead, drag her,‘x,’ by the hair, by her heart, by her soul, to me, ‘x,’ at every hour of life, dayand night, until she comes to me, ‘x,’ and may she, ‘x,’ remain inseparablefrom me. Do this, bind her for all the time of my life and help force her, ‘x,’to be serviceable to me. (375–83)

The homologies with the physical attitudes of humiliation required by aRoman execution are obvious. It is the deliberate placing of the body ina position from which, as it has been noted, it is almost impossible to de-fend oneself. The parallels then run through body position, femininity,subordination, and control.121 Therein lay the specific continuities in thenew economy of the body that were to be embedded at the center, some-what ironically, by Christian ideologues and those martyrs who exempli-fied the new practice. But, perhaps not so ironically, it took place in the


120. The standard English translation tends to disguise the double signification. Byholding the “sword,” quite unusually, in his left hand, the armed man makes clear oneof his intentions—not the hand in which one usually held the weapon of armor, butrather that of life (the left also signifying bad luck and ill omen); the verb kataplÜsswsignifies an attempt to bully and terrorize as much as actually to strike someone; thenoun katakleßv can mean the clavicular bone or that part of the neck, but most oftenit signifies a sheathed receptacle for a pointed object (a key, a bolt, a pin, an arrow ora dagger); for other parallels, see J. Henderson, The Maculate Muse: Obscene Lan-guage in Attic Comedy (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 1975; reprint:1993), 130 f., esp. nos. 140 f.; as a receptacle for a key, see Aristoph. Vesp. 154; as awoman’s neck or throat region: II Macc 3.19.

121. It is therefore somewhat surprising that Winkler, The Constraints of Desire,93–4, exculpates these “protocols” from representing a not-too-covert sexual violenceinvolving women.

theater of the national pornography of the Roman state—its public exe-cutions. Here the rending of flesh in public could be linked to the braveryexemplified by a woman in her confrontation with Roman authority and,simultaneously, to a language of love.122 So the whole of the story of theyoung Spanish girl Eulalia, as re-created by Prudentius, is embedded inexplicit erotic contexts.123 As the iron hooks of the executioners rakeacross and through her breasts, it is Eulalia (she who “speaks well”) whonotes the marks made by them as a species of writing on her body.124 Shecounts the letters (notas) as they appear on her body, and utters thewords:125

See, my lord, you are writing on me.How I love to read these letterswhich, my Christ, record your triumphs.The dark scarlet of my blood pouring outspeaks your holy name.

In ordinary discourse, to have one’s body written on was in itself a signof inferiority. To have a name inscribed on one’s body was a sign of ser-vility—a visible mark of the ownership of one’s self by another. But thelanguage of love could reverse the meaning.126


122. Her story begins with a planned, then rejected, marriage and then advances toher arrest, torture, and the taunt and challenge delivered to her torturers: “ergo age,tortor, adure, seca, divide membra coacta luto” (Prud. Peri. 3.91–2).

123. J. Petruccione, “The Portrait of St. Eulalia of Mérida in Prudentius’ Peris-tephanon 3,” AnBoll 108 (1990): 81–104, p. 98: “ . . . the description of Eulalia’s lac-eration seems a mixture of the violent with the erotic comparable to, if less explicitthan, the speech with which Agnes rushed upon the executioner’s sword (Pe.14.75–79)”; at p. 98 Petruccione suggests that the wounds on her body forming let-ters that spell Christ’s name recall the 144,000 in the Apocalypse who had the nameof the Lamb written on their foreheads (14.1); it is only fair, however, to point outthat these virgins are all males who had not allowed themselves to be “defiled bywomen.”

124. Prud. Peri. 3.135–40:Scriberis ecce mihi, Domine.Quam iuvat hos apices legerequi tua, Christe, tropaea notant.nomen et ipsa sacrum loquiturpurpura sanguinis eliciti.

125. As in Jerome, the language is heavily erotic. Dominus can mean husband orlover; tropaeum is used in love poetry for a sexual conquest (e.g., Ovid, Ep. 4.66,9.104, 20.214; Rem. 158); and the last verses hint at a lost virginity.

126. C. P. Jones, “Stigma: Tattooing and Branding in Graeco-Roman Antiquity,”JRS 77 (1987): 139–55.

LUGDUNUM: WARS MOST PEACEFUL

In the summer of the year c.e. 177 there erupted another one of those typ-ical but terrible pogroms in which the enraged crowds of a local popu-lace, this time of the Gallo-Roman city of Lugdunum (modern-day Lyon),turned on suspected Christians in their midst and demanded that Romangovernment, personified in the governor, punish the outcasts appropri-ately.127 The persecution began with local municipal authorities takingpre-emptive measures to banish the mere sight of Christians from publicplaces—they forbade Christians to visit each others’ houses, to frequentthe market-place and baths, and, finally, “to be seen in any place what-soever.” The writer, who witnessed the violent actions of the crowd, re-ports the sequel in which Christians were hauled from their homes,cursed, bound and beaten, dragged, torn and stoned. But, he claims, theywere able nobly to endure all these attacks (gennaiôs hypomenon). As theobserver makes clear in his general assessment of the onslaught, it was be-cause God made the weak strong that the Christians were empowered andacquired the endurance to resist the attack of the Evil One (dunamenosdia tês hypomonês pasan tên hormên tou ponêrou).128 Power is gainedthrough submission.

Both sides acted within a moral economy in which harassments andpunishments were traditional and well known. The local populace in-flicted on the bodies of the Christians “all the things which the people gen-erally love to inflict on their enemies and hated persons.” On their side,the Christians could now summon equally traditional ways in which tomeet and to resist the attacks on their bodies. The main appeal in the nar-rative is to the model of the competitive athlete. In his preamble theauthor of the letter names the martyrs “athletes of piety” (eusebeias ath-lêtôn)—their manliness and courage (andreia) wins battles more impor-tant than any war, their trophies are taken from demons, their victories(nikai) are over invisible opponents, and crowns (stephanoi) are their re-ward. God will inscribe their names on everlasting monuments.129 Simi-larly, the role of the devil is seen as that of an athletic adversary (ho an-tikeimenos) who has practiced and trained his supporters in athletic andgymnastic skills.130 In his evaluation of the martyrs who succeeded with-


127. Eusebius, HE 5.pr.1.1–2.8.128. Euseb. HE 5.1.6–7.129. Euseb. HE 5.1.1.130. Euseb. HE 5.1.5: Ãejßzwn touv Äeautoœu kai progumnÜzwn kata tœwn doýlwn

jeoœu. . . .

standing these attacks on their bodies (as opposed to those who found thesufferings too great), the writer explicitly appeals to athletic models: thebodies of the victorious were ready, trained, and eager whereas the bod-ies of the losers were untrained, unexercized, and feeble and therefore“not adequately prepared for the great contest.”131 In the horrendous tor-tures that followed, it is indeed the body and its ability to resist that count-ed for everything.

As the arrests continued in both Vienne and Lyon, the house-slaves ofthe Christians were seized and put to torture. They were not able to re-sist. After they had witnessed the application of torture with their owneyes, simple fear was sufficient to cause them to surrender. The authori-ties and the crowd then advanced to attack the Christians themselves.Christians were subject to indescribable tortures so that The Enemy couldforce the appropriate words from their lips.132 The torture of Sanctus wasan especially good example, since the writer forthrightly states that hisbody itself was a witness (to sômation martys) to what actually happened,and because the witnessing of Sanctus’s body is explicitly tied to noble en-durance (gennaiôs hypomenôn). Sanctus’s resistance continued to thepoint that no raw material was left on which the torturers could work—his body, tortured and twisted out of all human shape, was reduced to“one great wound.” When the torturers began a second assault on hisbody, thinking that he was no longer capable of endurance, it is Sanctus’sbody itself that humiliates them. Despite their repeated attacks on it,his body actually straightens out and regains its former appearance.133

The purpose of the torture was defeated not only by the corporeal actionof the body, but also in verbal enunciation. Sanctus would pronouncenone of the identifications of self required by the authorities—no wordsescaped his lips other than “I am a Christian.”

The reader enters and exits the narrative of the tortures through thebody of Blandina. It is with her that the body becomes central. The ironyis that her body is doubly weak: that of a woman and that of a slave. Sheembodied that which men judged to be cheap, ugly, and contemptuous.But she is able to refute these dominant valuations not with her physical


131. Euseb. HE 5.1.11: kai faneroß kai Âetoimoi egßnonto prwtomÜturev, o¤i kaimeta pÜshv projumßav Ãaneplhroun thn Äomologßan tœhv marturßav, Ãefaßnonto de kaioÄé ÃanÝtoimoi kai Ãagýmnastoi kai ‰eti Ãasjeneœiv, Ãagœwnov megÜlou tünon Ãenegkeœin mhdunÜmenoi. . . .

132. Euseb. HE 5.1.14–15.133. Euseb. HE 5.1.23–24: Âolon traœuma . . . kai Ãapobeblhkov thn Ãanjrþpeion

Õexwjen morfhn . . . Ãanwrjþjh to swmÜtion Ãen taœiv metÝpeita basÜnoiv, kai thn ÃidÝanÃapÝlaben thn protÝran. . . .

appearance (eidos) but with her personal power (dynamis). The figure ofBlandina is counterpoised to her mistress in the flesh (tês sarkinas de-spoinês autês)—the woman who owned Blandina’s body. This slave own-er was herself a Christian woman who was caught up in the contest (miaagônistria), but who was in agony (agôniôsês) lest her slave-womanBlandina not be able to hold out because of her bodily weakness (dia toasthenes tou sômatos). Contrary to the mistress’ assumptions, Blandinais able to endure—no doubt because she could draw upon two intersect-ing traditional subscripts of bodily resistance, that of women (comparethe two stories at the head of this paper) and that of slaves. She is able todo this to such an extent that the effect on the bodies and minds of hertorturers is reversed. It is they who become exhausted and wearied, andthey who are forced to confess. She therefore wins the contest and is hailedas a noble athlete (hôs gennaios athlêtês) no less that a male martyr likeMaturus who is labeled a noble contestant (gennaios agônistês). Blandi-na’s achievements are contrasted with those of another woman, namedBiblis, whose body had been “eaten by the devil” and which was there-fore easily broken and unmanly (anandros). At the end of this first test,Blandina’s only words are “I am a Christian” (Christianê eimi).134 In hisperoration the narrator is insistent that all these witnesses, including theslave woman Blandina, have finally achieved nobility through patience(tên eugeneian dia tês hypomonês).

BODY AND SOCIETY

In the power struggle between Christians and the Roman state, and in thepassions of the martyrs, the consciously elaborated ideology of hypomonêtook on greater and greater significance, until it came to have a com-manding presence in Christian perceptions of the body. The appropria-tions of experience became ever more insistent, with whole treatises andsermons devoted to the subject (Table 1). On grounds such as these, it hasbeen possible to construct an argument for the body as the critical site ofpower discourses that flow through it and are inscribed upon it—a sub-stance at the epicenter of the microactions and resistances that constituteand are power. Whatever cautions and caveats that have been issuedabout the use of such an hypothesis, however, its actual application hasnaturally tended to constitute the body predominantly in a passive mode.Such an implosive and fragmented construction of power is no small partof the reason why these theorists are reduced to speaking of all other pow-


134. Euseb. HE 5.1.17–19: Xristianh eÃimi.

er formations as not much more than hegemonial cumulations of mi-cropower struggles in the body.135 The evidence and scenes adduced herewould nuance this perspective. Since it is indeed the means by which weexperience and are imbued with the unspoken assumptions of our culture,


Table 1. Selected References to karterßa and Äõpomonh

Author karterßa Äõpomonh Comments

Septuagint 6 25 All kartepßa refs. arefrom IV Maccabees

Philo 31 19

New Testament 0 25 All Äõpomonh refs. arefrom Pauline texts

Ignatius 0 12

Gregory of Nyssa 5 24

Clement of Alexandria 9 47

Athanasius 10 49

Eusebius 32 67

Origen 9 99

Basil 14 105

Macarius (Ps.) 0 145

John Chrysostom 93 550

Note: For all authors, but notably in the cases from Gregory of Nyssa onward, the countincludes all texts in TLG, even those that have been attributed to the author on dubiousgrounds. The caveat is as follows: no particular emphasis is placed on a given author by him-self in isolation, but rather on the overall pattern as it develops from the first century b.c.e.to the fourth and fifth centuries c.e. Over this span of time, it would seem that the earliercreators of Christian ideology tended to eschew the vocabulary of karteria, whereas thosewho were writing later out of “more cultivated” milieux, and who were enmeshing the“higher discourses” of Hellenism with Christianity, tended to use both the vocabulary of“strength, power, and aggression” and that of “patience and endurance,” though with anincreasing tendency to prefer the latter. The total absence of the language of karteria in thePseudo-Macarius would seem to argue for a later date than the “fourth century” usually at-tributed to his works. Finally, by “John Chrysostom” is meant the “Chrysostomic corpus,”which therefore necessarily includes later works attributed to that author.

135. In this regard, as in that of the history of sexuality, the “late” Foucault cameto change his mind and seemed (albeit in his own inimitable fashion) to accept the prob-lem of more hierarchical structures of power relations, including the critical functionof institutions.

it is true that the body itself is a map of memory and bears the imprint ofone’s own and social remembrance.136 But it is equally true that this fieldof personal power meets strong oppositions and resistances in the objec-tive or structural continuities that long outlast, and extend far beyond,the existence of any one body.

It is that longer term duration of new institutional changes that weretaking deep root beginning in the first centuries before and during thecommon era that compelled a newly negotiated view of the body: a civilbody under trial and test in a civic régime of power, and one that had tohave a place in the new structures of belief. It is found explicated in thefictions of the time—in the romantic tales purveyed by the novelists, thedreamscapes of local notables and sophists, the literary inventions of Sto-ic philosophers, and the myths of Christian ideologues.137 It called for therewriting of old texts which had once highlighted the virtues of politicalopposition of the community, and the victorious struggle for a new ter-restrial order, a new state to be achieved here on earth. The mode of pas-sivity was not so much an autonomous virtue as a necessity, and one thatcompelled a new centrality of previously subversive values.

The body was indeed the site of a struggle. The spectacular trials andexecutions of the Christians are but an extreme instance of the use of forceto elicit a certain public behaviour from subject bodies, to inscribe onesort of ideology on the body. In this case, it was rejected. Not only didsuch attempts fail in individual cases—the cumulative effect of individualacts of resistance compelled a final failure in the long term. This observa-tion would suggest that bodies could be self-inscribed with ideologies thatran wholly contrary to those of the dominant power. Individuals couldchoose to forge and hold ideas about themselves and their bodies inde-pendently of the set repertoire presented to them. By appropriating andmutating existing ones, by using the justifications and legitimations of ex-isting ideologies of power as leverage for their own views, and by decid-ing to place their conceptions in action and priority before those being


136. P. Bourdieu, “The Dialectic of Objectification and Embodiment,” (in) Outlineof a Theory of Practice, transl. R. Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1977), 87–95 [Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique (Geneva-Paris: Droz, 1972)]; “Be-lief and the Body,” ch. 4 (in) The Logic of Practice, transl. R. Nice (Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 1990), 66–79 [Le sens pratique (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980)];further developed by Paul Connerton, “Bodily Practices,” ch. 3 (in) How Societies Re-member (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 72–102.

137. As emphasized by Goldhill, Foucault’s Virginity, these texts were largely ig-nored by Foucault in his construction of sexuality in Graeco-Roman society; and theyare not, by any means, the only body of relevant evidence that was not taken into con-sideration.

forced upon them, humans could create ever new mutations of bodily per-ception. This could involve a process as radical as a total inversion of thedominant male discourse on the body, the selective appropriation of itsvalues, and the elevation of “feminine” bodily powers as the primarymodes of identification and resistance. In the truth of the identity whichthey wished to assert, an inverted image of the body had become the quin-tessential weapon of the weak.138 But those bodies were still finite, mor-tal, isolated, and weak; and they faced the long-term durability of insti-tutional power. Institutions were containers of a more enduring power,and maintained both a relative and a final control of both violent and co-ercive force.139 It was these institutional forces—an organizational appa-ratus, a program of education, policing functionaries, a body of servitors,pervasive writings and records, an hierarchical membership and official-dom—that remembered, conferred and supported public identities, clas-sified, and, not inconsequentially, made enduring life and death decisionsthat were successfully enforced.140 The evidence of this investigation,therefore, points forcefully in the direction of the strong dialectic betweenindividual and structure, in both space and time. The residual problemwas that, although the body might well “never lie,” the variant truths em-bedded in it were often as contradictory and conflict ridden as those inthe world outside it. It alone could not subvert institutions or corporatebodies which had their own, much greater, endurance. Only new incor-porations could do that. From the perspective of the individual humanbody, all of this was a terrible hypocrisy. As even the martyrs themselvesconfessed, their passivity remained a paradox—in order to win, one hadto lose.

Brent D. Shaw is Professor of Classics at The University of Pennsylvania


138. James C. Scott, “Normal Exploitation, Normal Resistance,” ch. 2 (in)Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven-London:Yale University Press, 1985), 28–47.

139. Crespi, Social Action and Power, 109 f., who reinstates some Weberian veri-ties against postmodernist views on the diffusion of power relations.

140. Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,1986), esp. chs. 5–9.

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Body/Power/Identity: Passions of the Martyrs - Evergreen